CentOS 6.5 Login Screen GDM Issues

centosgdm

I have a few issues with the GDM login screen. I am using CentOS 6.5 and installed GNOME. I was able to change the background of the login screen by replacing the default.png image on the system.

However:

  1. Whenever the login screen loads, the "Appearance Settings" window shows – as if it is asking for a specific theme for GNOME. I really want this to go away…
  2. I cannot figure out how to change the icon loaded in the login panel, nor how to change the name of the OS on this same panel (CentOS 6.5).

Can anyone offer suggestions on how to make these changes? I've read a few articles on using the "Login Screen" manager, but I don't have that installed (and can't find it in the repo's).

EDIT #1: The first was solved by removing a link from within /usr/share/gdm/autostart/LoginWindow/ called gnome-appearance-properties.desktop.

EDIT #2: Looking in /usr/share/gdm/gdm-greeter-login-window.ui, I found the following code:

<object class="GtkImage" id="computer">
    <property name="visible">True</property>
    <property name="pixel_size">64</property>
    <property name="icon_name">computer</property>
</object>

If I comment this chunk out, the icon disappears on the login window. However, I cannot figure out which file it is referencing. I did a find / -name "computer*" and looked at every file this returned and none of them were the icon matching what is displayed.

Another interesting thing: I can change the icon_name property from computer to start-here and the icon stays the same. However, if I change it to something more absurd such as my-custom-icon, it shows a broken (perhaps default) image in its place. Again, I searched for any file named start-here and they all are different.

Best Answer

I don't believe there is any type of GUI to do this modification. You have to dig in an do it through the .ui file that's located here:

$ pwd
/usr/share/gdm

$ ls -l
total 32
drwxr-xr-x. 3 root root   4096 Dec  7  2011 autostart
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root    30 Mar 29  2012 gdb-cmd
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 13667 Mar 29  2012 gdm-greeter-login-window.ui
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root   261 Mar 29  2012 locale.alias
drwxr-xr-x. 3 root root  4096 Jun  4  2013 simple-greeter

For accessing the desktop's themes you can invoke the application that does this from the command line, it's also accessible in the user's pulldowns when they login as well as through gnome-control-center.

$ gnome-appearance-properties
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