Wallch not changing wallpaper after upgrade to 14.04

Sorry for the inconvinience Charlie, I am one of the developers of Wallch and I have to say that it isn't Wallch to blame about this misbehavior.

Wallch is built using the Qt framework and weird bugs appear on 14.04 on all the Qt based applications.

For example, I have noticed a bug in VLC: When I change the system volume, VLC's volume changes as well, Clementine's indicator appears and disappears all the time, and now Wallch seems to have problems as well like clicking the "Start" at Wallpapers tab not working and sometimes crashing the app, being able to open multiple instances from Unity, resizing of window seems to have problems as well, menubar sometimes not appearing, shortcuts like Ctrl+Q not working.

I had no problems with the Qt applications until I installed the NVidia drivers myself. Then all Qt based applications started to misbehave. Qt Creator (official IDE for developing Qt applications) crashed during startup with an X server specific error message.

This is truly frustrating for the developers. It is really sad to spend so many hours bug testing your application only to find out that the integration itself is broken and there is nothing you can do about it. Actually you can, but it is very frustrating to see so many things changing from the one to the other version of Ubuntu that require your code to change as well.

We had tested Wallch a lot of times, and we never had these kind of bugs.

I am on the process of fixing these bugs myself right now.

Please for more information see https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/wallch/+bug/1310776

To bring this issue back, I've been having issues with Wallch myself, and I seem to have found some small workaround to it. It involves using a terminal (which you'll have to dedicate to the program, but you can easily hide this away somewhere.) This solution applies to the changing of wallpapers from the normal wallpaper screen.

First, open up the graphical interface and set the time interval you wish to have the pictures changed on. I say to do this from the graphical interface because I can't find a command line option that will set it for you, though I may just not have combed the documentation enough/missed something obvious. Besides that, the time seems to be saved even after closing out the graphical application.

After setting your preferred interval, open up the command prompt and run wallch with the following command:

wallch --change=[directory for pics] --start

This worked and got the wallpapers changing at the interval I wanted in the directory I wanted without crashing the application. However, there were one or two times where it crashed/didn't work, regardless. To fix this, I ran:

sudo apt-get purge wallch

sudo apt-get install wallch

Then I ran the above mentioned piece of code and things ran like a charm.

Hope this helps!

I use variety. http://peterlevi.com/variety/ It is not the best solution but I really like this program, this is why I am promoting it. :)

I think there is a good workaround to this: using the Ubuntu tweak-tool, simply enable desktop icons and voila! my wallpaper is showing and changing regularly, wallch is working fine again. I hope this helps.

Try installing Wallch from the up to date repo:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:wallch/wallch-daily
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install wallch

The software centre version is outdated and didn't work for me but when I installed it from here it worked flawlessly!

p.s: make sure you select the correct desktop environment in the preferences. If confused try "Unity Gnome".