Making my own login screen
August 12, 2008 by Clair Ching
Filed under General
I am using GDM and so I could download themes from Gnome-Look. There are times when I feel the need to make a coordinated desktop and blog layout, etc. and this is one of those times. I’ve become addicted to the game The World Ends With You on my DS Lite so I can’t help but want my login screen to be WEWY. Right? Right!!!
So I looked for login screen that I could base it from and actually got the Sea theme from Gnome-Look. It’s a really simple theme with the usual icons for shutdown and stuff. I just needed to change the background image. I’ve never tried making a GDM theme until the other night when I couldn’t resist anymore. So yeah, the theme is archived and has some image files and a desktop config file and an xml file. I had to edit two files. The xml file and the config file. The xml file contains information about the theme itself – the layout, the images, etc. As for the desktop config, I think it’s the one GNOME looks for when you’re viewing it from the select login screen.
The xml file wasn’t too difficult for me to edit because I didn’t change the layout anymore and I didn’t change the images either. I just had to indicate that the background image I needed to use is the WEWY one and not the picture of sea. Thankfully the xml I got has comments so I could figure out what I needed to change. In my case I just had to say the filename of the background:
<!-- background -->
<item type="pixmap">
<normal file="wewy.jpg"/>
<pos y="0" x="0" width="100%" height="100%"/>
</item>
</code>
There are other options you could change actually: password box, hostname and clock section, the buttons for shutdown and suspend, etc. The xml file would have to be edited in such a way that you say what x and y positions the elements will be located in. You could also indicate colors and spacing if you so desire. I am a bit lazy so I just preferred to have it like that. Not much tweaks. Well, I did try some other tweaks with the x and y positions but that was it, mainly.
As for the desktop config file, GdmGreeterTheme.desktop:
[GdmGreeterTheme]
Greeter=wewy-mod.xml
Name=World Ends With You (mod) GDM
Description=Freshness
Author=Clair
Copyright=Copyright (C) 2008, Clair
Greeter is where you specify the xml file that it needs to load. And the name of theme is what you put after Name. I don’t know about the description really, so I just maintained it. I was reluctant to put author and copyright but I just added it so I know it’s the GDM theme I tweaked a little.
So if you feel like making your own GDM theme, you could try what I just did. It’s not so difficult after all. As for the theme I tweaked, you could get it from here.
