Howto: Download Tons of GNOME-Specific Wallpapers With One Command

Published on October 5, 2009 in Eye Candy, General by Rami Taibah

Gnome_by_JennyJenna

Gnome-look.org has tons of wallpapers to decorate your favorite desktop. However the website isn’t really friendly to download them all. You have to go through a long list of wallpapers, click through each and download the wallpaper from the wallpaper page. Luckily, with the power of the command terminal and ftp you can get tons of wallpapers with a single command!

First you need to create a directory in your home directory, lets call it Wallpapers
mkdir ~/Wallpapers

Now you need to connect to gnome.org ftp servers
ftp ftp.gnome.org
Next you will be asked to enter a username and password. “anonymous” will be your username and just press enter when prompted for the password.
Now lets navigate to the wallpapers on their servers
cd /pub/GNOME/teams/art.gnome.org/backgrounds
You will also need to turn prompting off, you don’t want it bugging you asking you if you want to download each single file
prompt off
Now lets download all 1280×1024 (assuming thats your resolution)
mget *1280x1024.jpg

Great huh? Now why don’t you rotate your wallpapers? Here check our 3 Great Ways To Rotate Your Linux Desktop article.

Image by JennyJenna

About Rami Taibah

Rami Taibah the founder of The Linuxologist and a self proclaimed geek and Linux aficionado. This fall, he will be pursuing an MIMS degree at UC Berkeley, California. You can follow him on Twitter @rtaibah.

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  • oh, thanks very much for this tutorial, i'm really like it!
  • Guest
    It's hard to find quality information like this, I'm glad i found this, thanks for the valuable information.
  • I did this, loved it. Approx 300 MB if I recall so not too bad.

    However, there are two 'cd' commands to navigate to the backgrounds folder. Doing this as written gives me:

    550 Failed to change directory.

    Easy enough to fix, just eliminate one of the 'cd' commands. :-).
  • Thanks Brie. Fixed :)
  • PendragonUK
    All I get with the last command is an "Illegal PORT command"
  • When do you get this error? I mean after which command??
  • That looks like five (5) commands to me. Anyone else see 5 commands? I see five commands.
  • Well two can be pedantic you know? The real download command is just the mget one. The others are just setting it up. Technically you can also do it in one.

    Anyways, the title is just meant to convey an easy method that would be really tiresome and boring if we did it with a gui.
  • I tried downloading all 1920x1200 wallpapers, but it asks me for typing "y" on each wallpaper, not a great deal!!. Is there an option for avoiding this?. Thanks!
  • prompt off

    Its right there in the post :). Is it hard to read? I mean should I find a better way to put text with code?
  • Ok, sorry... :s (I missed it because it's all kind of mixed -no space between code lines and normal text-). Thanks!
  • I followed the directions without thinking and ended up downloading them all to the home folder, rather than the newly-created Wallpapers folder. I should have navigated to Wallpapers before downloading. No big deal, though. mv and a wildcard a couple of times got them all in the right place. Thanks for the tip.
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