Nitrogen is a simple, lightweight application that allows you to change the background of your desktop. Some of its key features include support for Multihead and Xinerama, a recall mode that can remember the last wallpaper set and command line mode for script use.

If you are using Ubuntu 8.10 (with Openbox) or any other debian-based system, here is how you install and configure Nitrogen.

In your terminal,

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

add this two lines to the end of the file.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/k-belding/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/k-belding/ubuntu intrepid main

Press Ctrl + O to save the file and Ctrl + X to close the file.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nitrogen

This should install Nitrogen on your system

Setting background wallpaper

Assume that your wallpaper folder is at /home/username/wallpaper.

In the terminal, type

nitrogen ~/wallpaper

A window will pop up showing all the wallpaper in the folder. Pick the one that you want to set as background image and click Apply.

That’s it

To get it to autostart everytime you log in, in your terminal,

nano ~/.config/openbox/autostart.sh

Paste this into the end of the file

nitrogen --restore &

If the autostart.sh file does not exist, you will have to manually create one before you can carry out the above step.