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nasa wallpaper
(more examples: here, here, here)

If you enjoyed the real-time Earth wallpaper, you're going to like this one too: this is also a script (but a more advanced one) which changes automatically changes your wallpaper with a random picture from NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive.

The script automatically downloads the image and sets it as your wallpaper so after running the script, you don't have to do anything else.

For the script to automatically change your wallpaper every time you power-up your computer and boot into Linux, go to System > Administration > Startup Applications, click "Add", in the "Name" field enter whatever you want and in the "Command" field, enter the full path to the downloaded script (link at the end of the post).

Make sure you make the script executable, or else it will not work. For that, use the following command:

chmod +x 112717-random-nasa-wallpaper.pl


If you want to run the script every hour for instance, you can do it using cron. If you're not very comfortable with it, you can use Gnome-Schedule, a graphical user interface for cron:

gnome schedule

Download Random NASA Wallpaper script