Ken Wimer, a member of the Canonical Design team, is running a contest to collect a set of beautiful desktop backgrounds to ship with Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” in October.
In our next release, the Karmic Koala (Ubuntu 9.10), we would like to include a set of high quality desktop backgrounds. In order to accomplish this we call on anyone and everyone to submit images which are freely licensed CC-BY-SA and follow the guidelines for inclusion
We’ve created a photo pool on Flickr where you can submit or just browse proposed backgrounds:
Some of the guidelines include (from the project wiki page):
- Avoid prominent use of the Ubuntu logo. It appears in enough places already.
- No version numbers. Some individuals may desire to use an older theme, or use the latest theme in their older version of Ubuntu. Let your submission be about choice and do not use version numbers in your artwork.
- Avoid text, it calls for attention too much and will likely look bad when scaled. Plus it can’t be translated easily.
- Be careful with small patterns, they might become uneven when scaled.
- Consider how the wallpaper will interact with the panels, icons and windows.
- Show restraint in your use of color tone and contrast. The wallpaper sets the scene for other elements, it is not the main act.
Please join our Flickr pool and submit your images, but make sure you’ve read the complete project guidelines first. If your background makes the cut, millions of people will gaze upon your beautiful image in October.
7 comments
Windows 7 has a setting to have a dynamic background that changes over time and gets some new wallpapers from the web from time to time. It would be very nice if we could have a setting in Ubuntu that would draw a semirandom image from the Flickr pool every week. It should be set up so that all Ubuntu computers set to this setting would get the same image at the same time, to show a united image flow.
Aigars, that is awesome. It may be too late to do something like that for Karmic, but would you be willing to investigate it a bit? See if there is any existing Linux software to do what you suggest; if not, I bet a simple five-line python script would do the trick.
I’m glad to see they’re getting some good community involvement.
I’ve always thought each Ubuntu release should have a community theme (best theme from the community), and a Canonical theme which would be default.
(via Planet Ubuntu) Aigars’ idea is very doable. There are already programs (drapes and my favourite wallpaper-tray) which rotate wallpaper; several ways to access Flickr exist (http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=flickr&searchon=names&suite=jaunty§ion=all) and a cron job could serve to trigger the fetching.
Go for it
Upstream (Gnome) wallpapers are also great! (but sadly not installed by default…
Aigars Mahinovs,
Long before Windows 7, ever since Fedora 8 release, Fedora has included the ability to have dynamic wallpapers. Fedora developers have pushed the feature into upstream GNOME as well so every distribution can take advantage of it. Some like Mandriva has. Others have not. It’s their choice.
Can Ubuntu please ship at least one animated background?
Fedora seems to have been taking advantage of this feature for ages.
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