GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 309697
Ambiguous Setup GUI (background)
Last modified: 2005-11-23 04:49:21 UTC
This bug has been opened here: https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/12462 "First thing I do after an Ubuntu install, is change the entire looks of the desktop. When you go to System->Administration->Login Screen Setup, and search where to change the background colour, you find it under tab #2 : "GTK+ Greeter" eventhough of course Ubuntu uses the Themed Greeter, which is on a different tab of its own. I find this very confusing and illogical to say the least. This ambiguous UI made me believe/extrapolate, that the Themed Greeter could also use a background pic. After all, it was already using the color setting from the GTK Greeter, so why not its background pic as well ? Seemed somewhat "logical". But no, it doesn't work, which adds frustration and disappointment to the surprise... :-/ Now I am not suggesting that the themed greeter should be able to have a background pic instead of a simple colour. However it would be nice to make the GUI clear and logical, that is, either add the required controls to the Themed Greeter tab (color picker, image choser) or leave the GUI alone, as it is currently, but remove the relevant functionality from the Themed Greeter. That is, don't allow the themed greater to use a background colour, default to black. Either way is okay, as long as the controls for the two kind of greeters are not interfering with each other."
I found the above description a bit confusing to understand. Basically the complaint is that BackgroundColor affects both the GTK+ and Themed Greeter. In gdmsetup, BackgroundColor is on the GTK+ tab. gdmsetup should be reworked so this is more clear. This becomes especially confusing since the Color selector becomes insensitive if the "No background" is checked in the GTK+ tab. If the user is really using the Themed Greeter it is awkward that the "No background" must not be checked in order to set the color. Probably the right solution is for the Themed Greeter and the GTK+ Greeter not to share the same color selection. The Themed Greeter should probably have its own gdm.conf setting for color and the color selector should be added to the "Themed Greeter" tab. If we add a new option, gdmgreeter will probably need to be backwards compatible. If the new color configuration setting isn't in gdmgreeter, it should probably fallback to the color defined for gdmlogin.
This was fixed with the recent UI changes. The background color for the plain and themed greeters was split and both are configurable in gdmsetup.