Make it pretty!

   I have had to spend a lot of time this week on my netbook. Normally I really dig the Linux Mint background, but the light background of Mint 11 on my little netbook was just too bright and annoying to me for some reason. So, I set out to find something a little darker.
   Where do you go for a really great wallpaper? Well, my friend Bill just happened to post a link to probably the greatest wallpaper site I have ever seen at http://wallbase.cc/. Warning! You can easily lose several hours looking through wallpapers there.
   Changing your background in Mint or any other Gnome 2 using distribution is pretty straight forward. You right click on your desktop, select “Change Desktop Background” and then pick the one you want. You also have the ability to add other wallpapers not already in your background collection with the “add” button.
   Changing the login screen to match is a different matter altogether. I have found that the easiest way to accomplish this is to install http://ubuntu-tweak.com/. This is a great little package that will let you change all kinds of hard to find settings not the least of which is the login screen background. On ubuntu-tweak, youy simply select login settings, then unlock, click on the old wallpaper, surf to and choose the new one you want, then quit.
   Lastly, there is changing the “lock screen” wallpaper. This is the screen you are presented with when you unlock your computer after locking your session with a -l (that’s an L by the way). I thought it was really odd that that wallpaper isn’t controlled by the login wallpaper, but a little digging revealed a way to change this as well. There is a cute little command line trick to it:

sudo gconftool-2 –direct –config-source xml:readwrite:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults –set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename –type string `gconftool-2 –get /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename`

(note that the above command is all 1 line)
and then:

killall gconfd-2
killall gnome-screensaver

And that’s it folks! Again, this should all work on any Gnome 2 desktop.

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