Adding wallpapers in KDE 4, the metadata.desktop file and X–KDE–PluginInfo–Name attribute

Google bait-ish title as this is something I worked out through trial and error when I couldn't find any information about it.

Whilst poking around in KDE 4 I noticed that some wallpapers are supplied in multiple resolutions. E.g.

mike@continuity:~$ rpm -ql kdebase4-wallpapers | grep Fresh
/usr/share/wallpapers/Fresh_Morning
/usr/share/wallpapers/Fresh_Morning/contents
/usr/share/wallpapers/Fresh_Morning/contents/images
/usr/share/wallpapers/Fresh_Morning/contents/images/1024x768.jpg
/usr/share/wallpapers/Fresh_Morning/contents/images/1280x1024.jpg
/usr/share/wallpapers/Fresh_Morning/contents/images/1280x800.jpg
/usr/share/wallpapers/Fresh_Morning/contents/images/1440x900.jpg
/usr/share/wallpapers/Fresh_Morning/contents/images/1600x1200.jpg
/usr/share/wallpapers/Fresh_Morning/contents/images/1920x1200.jpg
/usr/share/wallpapers/Fresh_Morning/contents/screenshot.png
/usr/share/wallpapers/Fresh_Morning/metadata.desktop

Presumably KDE 4 picks the one that's most suitable for your screen resolution.

When I put my own multiple resolution wallpaper in to /usr/share/wallpapers I found that KDE 4 did not list it in the drop down list of available wallpapers. Eventually I worked out that it wasn't showing up because the value of the X-KDE-PluginInfo-Name attribute in the metadata.desktop file has to match the name of the directory the wallpaper is in. E.g.

mike@continuity:~$ grep X-KDE-PluginInfo-Name /usr/share/wallpapers/Fresh_Morning/metadata.desktop
X-KDE-PluginInfo-Name=Fresh_Morning

Once I made them match my wallpaper appeared in the list.

Mike Willis : 11 Jan 2009 23:13 |  Tags: Kde Kde4 Linux Wallpaper |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem