If you have used an Android phone, you will know that one of its cool features is the live wallpaper that can show animation on the home screen. How about implementing these live wallpapers on your Ubuntu desktop?
Live Wallpaper is a new wallpaper app that brings the Android-style live wallpaper to Ubuntu. It is currently available only for Ubuntu Precise (12.04) and Quantal (12.10).
Install Live Wallpaper
Run the Live Wallpaper app. Your desktop will now turn into a giant live wallpaper.
The Live Wallpaper indicator will also show up in the system tray.
In the Settings, you will find that the customization option is really limited. At the moment, you only have two live wallpapers: Galaxy and Nexus. The Settings allows you to auto start the wallpaper on login and change the FPS (Frame Per Second) of the live wallpaper animation.
For each wallpaper, you can also customize the settings such as number of stars, star size, colors etc.
What You Should Know…
This Live Wallpaper does not replace your desktop wallpaper. It is only an overlay on your desktop running the animation.
Once it is running, you won’t be able to access the files you placed on your desktop. Your mouse right-click will no longer work too.
Some people have reported that the live wallpaper is using high CPU resources for low end computer. If you are using an old laptop, you may not want to use this at all.
The good thing about Live Wallpaper is that you can activate/deactivate it quickly from the indicator in the system tray. I would love it if it can come with a beautiful weather live wallpaper that I can flick on to check the weather condition (and with a beautiful animation) when I need it. That would be cool.
What do you think? What type of live wallpaper do you think will be useful to you?
Damien Oh started writing tech articles since 2007 and has over 10 years of experience in the tech industry. He is proficient in Windows, Linux, Mac, Android and iOS, and worked as a part time WordPress Developer. He is currently the owner and Editor-in-Chief of Make Tech Easier.
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