How To Use Ubuntu Phone Live Wallpaper In Ubuntu Desktop

Ever since Ubuntu Phone has been unveiled, one of the major attraction for Ubuntu lovers is the lock screen “evolving circle” wallpaper for Ubuntu Phone. This default live wallpaper shows a number of statistics about your phone such as calls, messages etc. This evolving circle wallpaper has almost become the logo for Ubuntu phone.

In this tutorial I am going to show you how to use Ubuntu phone lock screen wallpaper in Ubuntu 14.04.

Install ‘evolving circle’ wallpaper in Ubuntu desktop:

Thanks to Vallery for creating this wonderful dynamic live wallpaper for us. He has also added it to his PPA. To install the evolving circle wallpaper, use the following commands in terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:muscovy/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install evolving-circle-wallpaper

Using ‘evolving circle’ wallpaper in Ubuntu desktop:

Once you have installed the Ubuntu phone lock screen wallpaper, you should be able to see it in the default list of wallpapers if you are using Gnome or Ubuntu. All you have to do is to change the wallpaper to the newly installed evolving circle wallpaper.

If you do not know how to change wallpaper in Ubuntu, go to Unity dash and look for wallpapers. You should see the option of Appearance here.

Click on it. You can see the evolving circle wallpaper here along with other default wallpapers. Choose the evolving circle wallpaper here.

Note:

The wallpaper is not as dynamic as you might think. The ring of dots in the main circle works as a 12-hour clock, growing white up to noon, then fading out up to midnight. The outer circles and their color change at random. But this does not happen like every second/minute. Which means you will not see the circles moving like in other live wallpapers.

There is configuration option for the evolving circle (as seen in the first picture). You can change the color of the wallpaper here. There is no option to change the time/frequency of the circle animation though. Which could be a good feature to add in near future.

And here is how this Ubuntu phone lock screen wallpaper looks in Ubuntu 13.04:

May be in some coming days I’ll write on how to use this lock screen in Android itself. Meanwhile, you can read another article on how to use Android style live wallpapers in Ubuntu. As always, your comments are highly valuable to me. Feel free to put your views. Ciao :)