NASA IOTD Wallpaper

Contents 1 Credits 2 Requirements 3 Install 4 Notes

Credits

Credits to: NASA Image of the day as Gnome background

Requirements

feh

run_once function (in your config):

function run_once(prg)
    if not prg then
        do return nil end
    end
    awful.util.spawn_with_shell("pgrep -f -u $USER -x " .. prg .. " || (" .. prg .. ")")
end

nasaBackground.sh:

#!/bin/bash
 
# grabs the nasa image of the day by RSS feed and updates the gnome
# background. add this to your cron jobs to have this happen daily.  this is,
# obviously, a hack, that is likely to break at the slightest change of NASA's
# RSS implementation. yay standards!

#EDITED FOR feh
 
rss=`wget -q -O - http://www.nasa.gov/rss/lg_image_of_the_day.rss`
 
img_url=`echo $rss | grep -o '<enclosure [^>]*>' | grep -o 'http://[^\"]*'`
 
img_name=`echo $img_url | grep -o [^/]*\.\w*$`
 
# this command is benign if the directory already exists.
mkdir -p $HOME/.backgrounds
 
# this command will overwrite the image if it already exists
wget -q -O $HOME/.backgrounds/$img_name $img_url
 
feh --bg-scale $HOME/.backgrounds/$img_name

Install

Put the nasaBackground.sh script to anywhere in your ~/ folder. Mine's here: ~/scripts/nasaBackground.sh

Using the run_once function, simply sh the nasaBackground.sh script.

run_once("sh /home/YOURUSERNAME/fooFolder/nasaBackground.sh")

Notes

When Awesome WM is run, it will take some time to download the image of the day etc. before the image is actually used as background. Something like 20-30 seconds I'd guess.

Take note that eventually the .background folder, that is created, will become pretty large. So keep an eye out for it, and reguarly erase it.

This can easily be modified for any other wallpaper-making-application instead of feh. You only need to modify the last line of nasaBackground.sh