Comment 23 for bug 676370

I made a quick script to fill the gap until this is fixed, at least if you're running maverick and using Mercator prokection that is..

#!/bin/bash

  wget --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:6.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/6.0" http://static.die.net/earth/mercator/1600.jpg

  mv ./1600.jpg ./.1600.jpg

  gconftool-2 --type string --set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename "/home/<user>/.1600.jpg"

exit 0

Then make a cron to execute every three hours and add the script to startup applications. I'm sure Carles will be able to solve the problem soon enough without having to resort to quick and dirty scripts like this though!