I have just switched from Fluxbox to giving xmonad a go, and I am definitely liking it. However, the one thing I haven't managed to do is to change my desktop background.
I am using Ubuntu 8 (uh, can't remember the value after the point), and I installed xmonad through the package manager, and then ran xmonad from the list of environments available on the login screen.
I have tried setting it using gconftool as suggested on the Haskell wiki, but it doesn't seem to have any effect.
Regarding prior comment from grawity, the correct syntax is actually
xloadimage -onroot -fullscreen <path.to.image>
The advantages over xloadiamge on xpmroot are:
(sorry if this would be better as a comment on previous answer: I can't add comments)
I had some trouble with xloadimage (didn't work at all) and xpmroot (only accepts xpms and gimp wrote a strange one that it barfed on), but feh --bg-fill worked wonderfully (thanks to some guys on the arch forum).
Does this command work: xpmroot ~/background.xpm &? Where background.xpm is the filename of the image you want to be your background.
I use feh for this:
feh --bg-fill ~/pictures/background
This lives in my ~/.xprofile and also produces a script ~/.fehbg which may be run to set the same background and configuration later. There are alternative arguments that may be used aside from --bg-fill, man feh elaborates.
Feh is widely available and may be installed from the default Ubuntu and Arch linux package repositories, and likely others.
For me putting
xsetroot -solid Indigo
in ~/.bash_profile is sufficent.
Using xsetroot does not require installing (and possibly compiling) a separate program (I don't see feh, xloadimage or xpmroot packages on Red Hat distributions). This program also supports bitmaps with configurable foreground/background colors to allow non-solid backgrounds.
