Variety

Variety changes wallpapers very slowly and irregular

Asked by Florian

I installed Variety using the commands given on my Ubuntu 14.04 with standard Unity desktop.
I already had a folder with Wallpapers that i added as folder, and marked the other sources as well because I think there are some nice ones there.
Then i configured Variety to change every 1 minute, but it doesn't.
It usually changes every 3-5 minutes, sometimes even 10. Also the wallpaper clock remains at the time the wallpaper has changed (could also be normal). Often, when it changes it skips 2 to 4 wallpapers very fast (I see them and they disappear after abound 1 second).
Also, when I point on the Variety logo and scroll up and down, nothing happens. When i right click and choose "Next" or "Previous" it could be (could also be random) that it does these actions when it changes irregularly next time.

Why does it have such problems? Any ideas?

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Florian (derhaberer) said : 		#1

I think the problem is based on the "convert" process that comes from the imagemagick-editing from the filters.
My computer takes very long for it (don't know why, has Dual-Core with I think 3 GHz) but I toggled filters and now it seems to load faster. Maybe also the process is sometimes in the background when I do much other things, like when i put my PC on standby it didn't load at all. This also explains why it loads one image very long and then skips through the missed changes fast.

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Peter Levi (peterlevi) said : 		#2

I'm glad you managed to pinpoint the problem.
Did you find out which of the filters were causing the delay?
Now that it works - do you have clock enabled and is it causing issues if you enable it?

Generally, on a fairly fast machine most filters run decently fast, unless the images are really big (e.g. 5000x5000 or so), I'm not sure why it would run that slow on yours. You may turn on logging (run variety with -v), thus it will log the exact command it executes when applying filters. You can then copy-paste these commands and test them separately to check why they run so slow.

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Florian (derhaberer) said : 		#3

Hey Peter Levi,
I used the filters (don't know what they are in English) "Oil painting", "pencil drawing" and "slightly blurred".
I think not all filters ran so slow, maybe they only encountered some problems because I executed other processes at the same time... The program was tested only for Ubuntu 12.10, like you wirte in the Overview.

Can you tell me where the variety application is located? When in type "variety -v" or "variety" in terminal it tells me it couldn't find the term.

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Peter Levi (peterlevi) said : 		#4

/opt/extras.ubuntu.com/variety/bin/variety
On 31 May 2014 21:26, "Florian" <email address hidden>
wrote:

> Question #249501 on Variety changed:
> https://answers.launchpad.net/variety/+question/249501
>
> Florian posted a new comment:
> Hey Peter Levi,
> I used the filters (don't know what they are in English) "Oil painting",
> "pencil drawing" and "slightly blurred".
> I think not all filters ran so slow, maybe they only encountered some
> problems because I executed other processes at the same time... The program
> was tested only for Ubuntu 12.10, like you wirte in the Overview.
>
> Can you tell me where the variety application is located? When in type
> "variety -v" or "variety" in terminal it tells me it couldn't find the
> term.
>
> --
> You received this question notification because you are an answer
> contact for Variety.
>

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Florian (derhaberer) said : 		#5

It doesn't work,
there is a script in this directory, but i can't run it. ("command not found")