After a boring moment and coming across a little guide video on youtube that used Windows 7 with the rotating desktop wallpapers, I decided to see if I could make rotating wallpapers work in XFCE. A quick google search later and I came across this simple guide: http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/creating-slide-show-backgrounds-xfce
I only had to tweak the cron job line to stop the command output going to system mail every time it ran, and it all worked as expected.
My crontab line: */5 * * * * /usr/bin/xfdesktop –display=:0.0 –reload >/dev/null 2>&1
Another interesting way that doesn’t use cron is described here:
http://rockhopper.dk/linux/software/xfce/xfce-auto-rotate-wallpaper-without-cron/