Linux Candy: Fantascene – dynamic wallpaper

Linux Candy is a series of articles covering interesting eye candy software. We only feature open source software in this series.

Some of the programs in this series are purely cosmetic, frivolous pieces of fun. Candy at their finest. But we also include some programs that aren’t purely decorative.

There are a diverse range of programs included in this series. Programs such as eDEX-UI and Variety are actually highly practical programs. ASCIIQuarium has soothing and relaxing qualities for your desktop. Other programs included in this series (such as lolcat, cacafire) are included purely for their decorative qualities. And then there’s some really fun software that just raises a smile or two.

We’ve previously included wallpaper software in this series with WallpaperDownloader, Fondo, and Variety featured. But Fantascene is somewhat different to those tools.

Fantascene is a wallpaper changer. But it’s not a bog standard changer. It plays video wallpapers on your background. With modern CPU and GPUs there are often buckets of spare system resources, so why not use them to make your desktop stand out from the crowd.

Installation

Sometimes life is too short compiling source code, and sometimes a project’s dependencies can be troublesome to install with certain versions of a distro.

In the case of Fantascene, there are releases through Open Build Services which provide binary packages for a number of distros including Ubuntu. There isn’t actually a package for Ubuntu 23.10 at the time of publication, but the package for 23.04 still works fine. Download the package with wget.

$ wget https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/liuminghang/xUbuntu_23.04/amd64/fantascene-dynamic-wallpaper_1.6.4-1_amd64.deb

Trying to install this package with dpkg wasn’t successful.

$ sudo dpkg -i fantascene-dynamic-wallpaper_1.6.4-1_amd64.deb

This was because our system is missing libqt5webenginewidgets5 and libxcb-ewmh2 packages. The missing packages and Fantascene can be installed with the command:

$ sudo apt-get install -f

Here’s the output for the wget, dpkg, and apt-get commands.

Let’s explore Fantascene.

Next page: Page 2 – In Operation and Summary

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation and Summary