In this article I showed how to update the background of an X desktop with various text status dumps. I have been using IceWM because it has always been the most stable window manager. It was also useful when bringing up an OS from source, as IceWM can be compiled quickly. KDE has a lot of really cool features, though. One thing that I never could never figure out was how to run my perl desktop update script and use dynamic backgrounds on KDE. Esetroot didn’t work correctly with KDE, but it worked fine with IceWM. It turns out that if you have a background image that you generate via cron, all you have to do is add a simple task to run. Go in to configure desktop, advanced options, and add a simple task like echo ruk > /dev/null. Set the refresh time, and it will update your desktop with the image you specify. If you don’t need the granularity of cron, you could just use the refresh time to run your script directly. Here is my desktop this month and the related KDE configuration settings.