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Bug 695662 - Feature Request: Make changing GDM3 Background and Greeter Images user-friendly
Feature Request: Make changing GDM3 Background and Greeter Images user-friendly
Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 738260
Product: gdm
Classification: Core
Component: general
3.6.x
Other Linux
: Normal enhancement
: ---
Assigned To: GDM maintainers
GDM maintainers
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
 
Reported: 2013-03-11 23:26 UTC by Andrew
Modified: 2016-03-08 15:04 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: ---



Description Andrew 2013-03-11 23:26:15 UTC
I find it alarming the lengths that Gnome3 has gone to make customizing it very difficult at best and impossible at worst. Currently, to accomplish the task of customizing the login background and screen I have to do three things either as root or with sudo:

First, to change the background before the greeter appears, I have to hack /etc/dconf/db/gdm.d/custom-login and at the lines:

[org/gnome/desktop/background]
picture-uri='file:///PATH/TO/FILENAME.png'

THEN, to change the greeter's dull default grey background I have to make two more sloppy hacks.

The first being overwriting "/usr/share/gnome-shell/theme/noise-pattern.png" with an image of my choice.


Then, if it's not a texture I have to dig into "/usr/share/gnome-shell/theme/gnome-shell.css" and the line that says:

background-repeat: repeat;

to

background-repeat: no-repeat;

Which I guess isn't so hard but a bit annoying. Moreso, I have no idea how to tell it to scale / stretch / fill the image when using a desktop background style image. I'd rather not have to custom tailor the image to my display's dimensions. Anyways, as you can see, this is clearly not user-friendly and it's borderline ridiculous the hops I had to jump through to even get this far and figure it out. There's also no known 3rd party applications or shell extensions to address this at the moment either to my knowledge.

I, along with many other users, would like to a see a highly customizable Gnome 3, not some nazi takeover of our desktop which forcefeeds us one depressing grey / white / black theme while saying tough cookies to anyone with any splash of creativity by going out of its way to bury such features / settings as deep as possible.

I know Gnome 3 is about ease of use and not overwhelming the user with too many choices but there's a difference between easy and "Ubuntu-ification" (catering to idiots that can make cereal catch fire to the point of warranting the sealing off of anything and everything) /rant

PLEASE ADDRESS
Comment 1 Andrew 2013-03-12 16:09:59 UTC
NOTES: I discovered that this portion of the work-around "...change the background before the greeter appears, I have to hack /etc/dconf/db/gdm.d/custom-login and at the lines..." doesn't always work.

Instead, I have install dconf-editor then:
$ xhost + (temporarily give user gdm gui privileges)
$ sudo -u gdm dconf-editor

Then navigate through org > gnome > desktop > background

Edit the picture-uri string file:///PATH/TO/FILENAME.EXTENSION

-------------

Also, I learned that one does not have to overwrite noise-texture.png in "/usr/share/gnome-shell/theme/" in order to change the login greeter / lock background but can instead edit gnome-shell.css and change the line under "#lockDialogGroup {" from "background: #2e3436 url(noise-texture.png)" to "background: #2e3436 url(PATH/TO/FILENAME.EXTENSION)"

Apologies for any inconvenience caused by the errors made in my original report but I can't edit it so the best I can do is append this to it.
Comment 2 Matthias Clasen 2013-04-24 22:55:17 UTC
As you've probably figured out, the login screen doesn't feature a customizable background anymore. The gray noise pattern is there to differentiate system context from the user session, where you can have your own background, etc.
Comment 3 BoogerGnome 2014-04-03 22:00:25 UTC
(In reply to comment #2)
> As you've probably figured out, the login screen doesn't feature a customizable
> background anymore. The gray noise pattern is there to differentiate system
> context from the user session, where you can have your own background, etc.

So why does the documentation on the GNOME website say that you can change the background of the login screen?

https://help.gnome.org/admin/system-admin-guide/stable/login-background.html.en

linked from

https://help.gnome.org/admin/system-admin-guide/stable/index.html.en
Comment 4 Matthias Clasen 2014-04-04 11:26:36 UTC
that documentation is outdated
Comment 5 BoogerGnome 2014-04-04 12:40:14 UTC
(In reply to comment #4)
> that documentation is outdated

Yet there is it is, at least a year after it ceased to be of use, sitting there prominently linked, for people to find and subsequently waste their time failing to make what it describes work, undermining people's confidence in GNOME's documentation.
Comment 6 André Klapper 2014-04-04 12:54:27 UTC
(In reply to comment #5)
> Yet there is it is, at least a year after it ceased to be of use, sitting there
> prominently linked, for people to find and subsequently waste their time
> failing to make what it describes work, undermining people's confidence in
> GNOME's documentation.

Your help is welcome. 
See https://wiki.gnome.org/Git/Developers and https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-user-docs/tree/system-admin-guide . Looking forward to your patch!
Comment 7 Kat 2014-06-17 22:15:17 UTC
Help with work on the sysadmin guide is more than welcome.

For now, these instructions have been removed from the sysadmin guide.
Comment 8 Peter Wunder 2016-03-07 22:31:33 UTC
It's been nearly three years. Has any progress been made?
Right now, GNOME 3's support for custom backgrounds (be it desktop, login, or lock screen backgrounds) is worse than that of Windows, which is amazing, because Microsoft went to great lengths to make wallpapers in Windows crap.
Comment 9 Ray Strode [halfline] 2016-03-08 15:02:44 UTC
yea, there's a duplicate of this bug somewhere in bugzilla with a draft patch that some downstreams are using. Still trying to figure out what the upstream story should be.
Comment 10 Ray Strode [halfline] 2016-03-08 15:04:42 UTC
Duping this bug to that one, since that one has a patch and doesn't talk about nazis

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 738260 ***