Pictures folder: --location requires absolute path

[Bryce Harrington]

Binary package hint: gnome-screensaver

As I understand it, gnome-screensaver detects if ~/Pictures exists and if so loads photos for a slideshow from there.

However, this does not seem to work on my system. If I create ~/Pictures and put photos in it, nothing shows up. I was able to get it to work by editing /usr/share/applications/screensavers/personal-slideshow.desktop and set Exec as follows:

 Exec=/usr/lib/gnome-screensaver/gnome-screensaver/slideshow --location=/home/bryce/Pictures

I could not get --location=Pictures nor --location=~/Pictures to work, so I believe the issue to be that relative directories are not being handled properly.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Mon Jun 29 21:56:35 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
Package: gnome-screensaver 2.27.0-0ubuntu1 [modified: usr/share/applications/screensavers/personal-slideshow.desktop]
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=C
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.30-9.10-generic
SourcePackage: gnome-screensaver
Uname: Linux 2.6.30-9-generic x86_64

[Marc Deslauriers (mdeslaur)]

Bryce, what's the contents of your ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs file?

[Marc Deslauriers (mdeslaur)]

You can also use --location=$HOME/Pictures as a workaround, but I'm curious why your pictures directory isn't picked up automatically.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

This is with a totally stock ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs (attached anyway).

I've retested this with latest lucid, and while --location=~/Pictures still does work as I think it should, --location=Pictures does work now, as does --location=$HOME/Pictures.

(My real ulterior motivation for this is to be able to set up my folk's computers to share baby photos with them via UbuntuOne, but I'm finding the --location option to be kind of spotty and it isn't working for this purpose. I haven't re-tested UbuntuOne on Lucid but I did just re-test if the photos are on an NFS mount point and it still doesn't seem to read them.)

[Marc Deslauriers (mdeslaur)]

So, you actually have three issues?

1- Default pictures directory as set by XDG_PICTURES_DIR isn't being used by the screensaver
2- screensaver's --location should accept ~/Pictures
3- screensaver doesn't work with pictures directory specified on an NFS mount point

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 12:59:47AM -0000, Marc Deslauriers wrote:
> So, you actually have three issues?
>
> 1- Default pictures directory as set by XDG_PICTURES_DIR isn't being used by the screensaver
> 2- screensaver's --location should accept ~/Pictures
> 3- screensaver doesn't work with pictures directory specified on an NFS mount point

No, just issues #2 and #3. The default out-of-the-box settings work
fine.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for gnome-screensaver (Ubuntu Lucid) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for gnome-screensaver (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[Ramón Rocha (ramon.rocha)]

I don't know how to make a patch but if you change this "if" statement around line 100 in savers/slideshow.c from

if (location != NULL) {
    g_object_set (engine, "images-location", location, NULL);
}

to something like

if (location != NULL) {
    wordexp_t expanded_location;
    wordexp(location, &expanded_location, 0);
    location = expanded_location.we_wordv[0];
    g_object_set (engine, "images-location", location, NULL);
}

and #include <wordexp.h> it will expand ~/Pictures correctly

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

the correct way to fix this is to have an easy to configure preference for it (googling to edit text files doesn't quite cut it)

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

which is reported as bug 47604

[Ramón Rocha (ramon.rocha)]

Rolf, I would say configuration is a separate issue. The bug described here is about the ~ path not getting expanded correctly.