GNOME users have long been left out in the cold when searching for a good looking & easily-themeable ‘Weather Wallpaper’ application.

Over a year ago I ran down the Gnome-friendly alternatives to KDE’s slick weather wallpaper plug-in and found, perhaps unsurprisingly, very slim pickings. A year on, is the forecast looking brighter? (Last weather-related pun, honest!)

WeatherPaper
Weatherpaper is a stylish, ever-changing and informative utility that sets your desktop wallpaper inside to an image conveying the weather outside.
WeatherPaper has many plus points: –
  • It’s fully themeable – create and package your own wallpaper set
  • uses data from weather.com
  • can display various information on an overlay
  • Choose interval for checking forecast
  • Set preferred units for temperature
Create a ‘weatherpack’
If the default look doesn’t do much for you (and admittedly it probably won’t) then creating your own custom weather pack requires only two things: patience and plenty of weather-related imagery. There’s an excellent guide on getting up & running over on the WeatherPaper wiki: –
Download & installation
Want it? Follow this quick step through to get weather-based wallpaper draped over your desktop: –

  • Download WeatherPaper here
  • Extract the folder somewhere accessible
  • Open a terminal, navigate to the extracted folder using ‘cd 0.2.2-linux/’
  • Now enter the following command to install: –
    • sudo sh install.sh
  • Head up to Applications > Accessories > WP Settings to enter your location & set you preferences before launching the app via  Applications > Accessories > WeatherPaper

Finding your location

Although WeatherPaper refers to using ‘yahoo’ weather this is, in fact, powered by weather.com. To find your weather.com location code head over to weather.com, search for your location and then paste the corresponding part of the URL into the settings window.