Setting xmonad's background

Question

I have just switched from Fluxbox to giving xmonad a go, and I am defiantly liking it. However, the one thing I haven't managed to do is to change my desktop background.

I am using Ubuntu 8 (uh, can't remember the value after the point), and have installed xmonad through the package manger, and then run xmonad from the list of environments availble on the login screen.

I have tried setting it using the gconftool as suggested on the Haskell wiki, but it doesn't seem to have any effect.

Answer 1

Regarding prior comment from grawity, the correct syntax is actually

xloadimage -onroot -fullscreen <path.to.image>

The advantages over xloadiamge on xpmroot are:

• allows png images
• on Ubuntu, has its own package, rather than bein contained in the larger fvwm package

(sorry if this would be better as a comment on previous answer: I can't add comments)

Answer 2

Does this command work: xpmroot ~/background.xpm &? Where background.xpm is the filename of the image you want to be your background.

Answer 3

I had some trouble with xloadimage (didn't work at all) and xpmroot (only accepts xpms and gimp wrote a strange one that it barfed on), but feh --bg-fill worked wonderfully (thanks to some guys on the arch forum).