Change Login Screen On Fedora 14

I’ve been doing some tweaks on the machine I set up with Fedora 14 (Laughlin) using Gnome. Things were OK until I decided to change the login screen image. I did a Google search and found a solution that didn’t work for me. I have also read from forums that there was no way to change the image unlike the earlier versions of Fedora. I then had this idea of finding the image used as the login screen background and overwriting it with my preferred image. 

So I checked the “/usr/share/backgrounds/” directory and found a “laughlin” folder. Inside it is a folder named “default” that contains three other folders named normalish, standard, and wide and a laughlin.xml file. The three folders contained the default login screen image.

If you open the xml file with a text editor, you’ll notice that a part of it specifies the path of the Laughlin wallpaper. Wide, Normalish, and Standard specifies the image dimensions. And using this xml file, we can change the login screen image.

                                             Laughlin XML File

Here’s what I did. First, I edited my image three times using the specified dimensions (this is optional) and saved them as PNG files. I then copied them to the three folders with respect to their dimensions.

Firstly go to super User and then follow the steps as per your need 

# cp /current/file/location/filename1.png /usr/share/backgrounds/laughlin/default/wide/

# cp /current/file/location/filename2.png /usr/share/backgrounds/laughlin/default/standard/

# cp /current/file/location/filename3.png /usr/share/backgrounds/laughlin/default/normalish/

Using vi, edit laughlin.xml and replace the filenames and save the file. See image below.

Edited Laughlin XML File

I logged off and there was my new login screen. 

Njoy the New login background