GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 328050
background color not set after login
Last modified: 2006-03-08 19:33:24 UTC
That bug has been described on https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/gdm/+bug/27913 "in gdmsetup, I changed the background colour, but it doens't seem to have any effect, whenver I log-in, I still see the old/default colour..." In fact the color is used before displaying the gdm screen but not between the login and the desktop, it used to do that
Note that if you are using the graphical theme, it now uses the GraphicalThemedColor as the backgroundcolor. The BackgroundColor is only used by gdmlogin. This was separated into two keys because some users do not want to use the same background color for their graphical theme as they do for gdmlogin. This happens sometimes because gdmlogin is often used by XDMCP/remote logins and the graphical for console logins. And the background color that makes sense for using with the graphical theme (often the same background color as used in the theme so the transition doesn't look so obvious) may not look good with gdmlogin. Try changing GraphicalThemedColor and I think you will see the behavior you want.
For Ubuntu we have that to gdm.conf (using 2.13.0.7): "BackgroundColor=#523921 GraphicalThemedColor=#523921" But the background between the gdm login and the desktop background displaying is blue, reopening the bug
Hey Sebastien. I think I'll need some help from you to track down why this failure is happening. You may notice that the /etc/X11/gdm/PreSession/Default script now has logic where it calls gdmflexiserver to get the background color. Note that it depends on the GDM_GREETER_TYPE environment variable being set by the daemon. Perhaps you could put some debug statements in your PreSession script to identify exactly why it is defaulting to blue. Reasons could be, GDM_GREETER_TYPE is somehow not being set properly by the daemon. I looked at the code and this looks okay to me. The problem could be that the gdmflexiserver commands aren't right, but they seem to work on my machine. Perhaps the "sed" code that works on Solaris isn't working on Linux? so perhaps the check to make sure that the value starts with "OK" is failing. You might have to do some hacking on the PreSession script to get this working. Also notice that PreSession only looks for the color when gdmgreeter is used if the BackgroundType is 1 or 2. Perhaps the problem is you are using "3" and want the background color to be set to the value specified? If this is your problem, then if you create a patch for PreSession.in to also accept "3" I would accept it.
the gdmflexiserver calls from a command line return a GTK warning about the display opening and no actual value, that's probably the issue
Could you check again? gdmflexiserver should only try to start a display if *not* run with the --command argument. Also the --command argument won't work right if you don't use the quotes properly. Perhaps you could turn on debug in gdm.conf and send me the syslog output. That would help because then I could see the gdmflexiserver --command traffic and see what is happening.
I run 'gdmflexiserver --command="GET_CONFIG greeter/GraphicalThemedColor"', it returns the standard Gtk warning "cannot open display:" and there is no trace in the log of the command, it probably exit before doing anything
commenting the gtk_init() call from gui/gdmflexiserver.c fixes the issue so the issue is clearly that it tries to init GTK when calling -command too
fixed now