Garten Eden

CUDS #3 Change GDM Appearance

Eduard Dopler, 05 Nov, 2010

Speaking of GDM: With some tiny terminal commands it is very easy to change the wallpaper of the login manager using the common graphical user interface. Lets make your startup more individual!

Once upon a time …

It used to be easy as pie to start the gnome-appearance-properties with the prefix sudo -u gdm and dbus-launch and to apply the changes that way. Nowadays we receive an error message trying:

$ sudo -u gdm dbus-launch gnome-appearance-properties
gnome-appearance-properties:4409): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display: :0.0
No protocol specified

In even former times there was an option in the GDM settings dialog. But God knows why it was removed, so its a bit harder now. Or is it?

Manual work

The reason for the error since Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick is that the user gdm is not allowed to start X applications anymore. So let us give him our OK for that:

xhost +SI:localuser:gdm

Now we change the current console/terminal user:

sudo su -lp gdm

and start our well-known appearance tool:

dbus-launch gnome-appearance-properties

By editing the settings as usual, we can change things like the wallpaper, design and the fonts.

By the way, I use this nice wallpaper.

Notes

• This method to raises warnings and errors in the terminal window but this is normal for an graphical program not developed for a console start.
• Due to possible rights problems it is a good idea to copy your favorite pictures to /usr/share/backgrounds.
• If the Accessibility Icon appears in your panel, you can make it disappear by typing

  gconftool-2 -s /desktop/gnome/accessibility/keyboard/enable -t bool false