How to | Set a Website as Linux Mint Wallpaper

Nov 8, 2017

Since I’m monitoring everything I can with grafana and really like the graphs, I was looking for a way to display grafana as my lock screen / screensaver.

Linux mint uses its own screensaver, you can install xscreensaver and download the additional “webscreensaver” python script, but this is unneccesary.

The cinnamon screensaver provides a webkit screensaver plugin. We will use this to load a html file that has an iframe to display a website.

01: Install cinnamon webkit screensaver

sudo apt install cinnamon-screensaver-webkit-plugin

02: Copy the template

goto: cd /usr/share/cinnamon-screensaver/screensavers/webkit@cinnamon.org
copy: cp -r webkit-stars@cinnamon.org webkit-web@cinnamon.org
goto: cd webkit-web@cinnamon.org

03: Specify the target

open editor index.html nano index.html

Replace content with (also replace GOOGLE-URL with your URL):

<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
  <head>

  </head>
  <body style="margin: 0">
<iframe style="position: absolute;width: 100%; height: 100%; border: none"
        src="http://google.com"></iframe>
  </body>
</html>

open metadata.json

Replace content with:

{
    "uuid": "webkit-web@cinnamon.org",
    "name": "Website",
    "description": "Display a website"
}

04: Apply settings

Save everything and head to: Start Menu > Preferences > Screensaver (or just Screensaver into the search)

It should look like this:

grafana

Note: If you cannot enable auth.anonymous for your grafana instance, you have to figure out how to login automatically. This should be rather easy because it is possible to just include jQuery and use JavaScript.