Jul 20 2006
Down with Brown - Changing Login / Splash Screen on Ubuntu Dapper Drake (6.06)
Published by Ivan Groznii at 11:14 am under Linux How-To |
Let’s be honest. Ubuntu is a beautiful operating system, but whoever decided that brown was going to be its signature colour wasn’t playing with a full deck. Brown hasn’t been in vogue since the 1970’s, when apparently everyone’s senses were taken over by space aliens from the Planet Tacky.
Fortunately, there are a number of ways to change it; first and foremost is getting rid of that awful background image, which could be entitled “Vat of Swirling Chocolate in Slough”. Download your image, put it somewhere safe (I generally keep a folder called wallpaper in my Home directory), right click anywhere on the desktop, browse to your image of choice, and voilà, that’s gone.
But Ubuntu Brown is more insidious than that; it makes an appearance in both the login screen (i.e., the screen that prompts you for your password) and the splash screen (the little widget that tells you that Nautilus and Update Manager are loading up).
I’m happy to report that changing the login screen is a snap. However, changing the splash screen was a bit more complex.
First and foremost, pick your login screen and splash screen. I used www.gnome-look.org to find ones that I liked. The login screens can be found under “GDM Themes”. The splash screens have their own link.
Login screens should be downloaded and saved as a tar.gz file. Look then under System > Administration > Login Screen Setup. You’ll see a button to allow you to add a theme. Browse to the relevant package and install it. You can also change the colour of the desktop using the eyedropper tool on this screen.
What to do with the splash screen is less straightforward. The image for the splash screen is held in /usr/share/pixmaps/splash, and there are two copies of the same image - ubuntu-splash.png and ubuntu-slick.png.
Before doing anything, I made two copies of the downloaded splash screen and put them on the Desktop. I renamed the copies ubuntu-splash.png and ubuntu-slick.png. I then went into Applications > Accessories > Terminal and typed:
cd /usr/share/pixmaps/splash
And then -
sudo mv ubuntu-splash.png ubuntu-splash-old.png
Which renamed the old splash screen rather than deleted it, in case I ever wanted it. I did the same to ubuntu-slick -
sudo mv ubuntu-slick.png ubuntu-slick-old.png
Then migrate back to the Desktop using cd - the directory is /home/yourname/Desktop. I then typed -
sudo mv *.png /usr/share/pixmaps/splash
I rebooted my machine to test if it had worked; it had. You may want to do the same, if only to enjoy the fact that the brown has disappeared.
8 Responses to “Down with Brown - Changing Login / Splash Screen on Ubuntu Dapper Drake (6.06)”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
So what color do you recommend they use? I’ve always been partial to Avocado.
I use different colour schemes on different computers.
On the computer I just built, the predominant colour is blue and I have a silver splash screen.
On the custom built desktop, the predominant colour is dark green.
On my HP laptop, it’s sort of an eerie green.
On my Katana laptop, it’s desert sand colour - the computer has a “Arrakis - Dune - Desert Planet” theme going.
The Xubuntu desktop has aqua and black as its themes.
I do this partially because I can and partially it’s to distinguish between them - Linux is about diversity, and I ensure that happens with the various implementations I perform.
If you don’t like the brown-ness of Ubuntu then you might well be interested in
http://whosdabbling.blogspot.com/2006/07/ubuntu-some-like-it-blue-your-help.html
Good information! I’ll put it in my Ubuntu how-to binder. I must say, however, that I really like the standard brown theme. It is one of the things I find delightful about Ubuntu. Others (equally unimportant functionally) are the little drumroll at logon, the peaceful little startup and shutdown music clips, and the beautiful (but also brown) images that can be used as backgrounds.
One way I accidentally got rid of the brown in the startup process was when I installed kubuntu elements (in order to play with Konqueror and others). I did a rather encompassing
sudo apt-get install kubuntu*
and now it’s all blue instead when it loads up. Still shows brown for the actual nautilus loading/options and username/password login, but you covered those.
I don’t mind the brown — I get so tired of MS blue’n'gray that it’s a nice change
Although dapper veers alarmingly more toward orange than brown. I hope they don’t continue that trend in 6.10.
A comment on the “two copies”.
There really aren’t two copies of the image. If you look at the contents of /usr/share/pixmap/splash in an untouched Ubuntu system you should see something like this:
$ ls -l /usr/share/pixmaps/splash/
total 112
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 35324 2006-06-15 11:26 gnome-splash.png
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 71403 2006-05-30 04:48 ubuntu-slick.png
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 16 2006-06-05 17:07 ubuntu-splash.png -> ubuntu-slick.png
That second copy is really a symbolic link to the single copy of the image.
So the way to change the splash with a little finess would be to simply place your new image in the directory, actually it could be anywhere, but let’s say you make it /usr/share/pixmaps/splash/my-favorite.png
Then just execute the command:
ln -sf /usr/share/pixmaps/splash/my-favorite.png /usr/share/pixmaps/splash/ubuntu-splash.png
This will make the link point to your new splash screen. The -f option forces ln to replace the existing symlink, otherwise it would just complain that it already exists.
[...] Luckily, I stumbled on the converting Ubuntu to blue article, which sets out to solve this very problem. Essentially it just presents links to Ubuntu to Blubuntu , it’s a zip and Blubuntu which elaborates even more. In addition, I also found Down with Brown - Changing Login / Splash Screen on Ubuntu Dapper Drake (6.06) [...]
[...] Let �s be honest. Ubuntu is a beautiful operating system, but whoever decided that brown was going to be its signature colour wasn�t playing with a full deck.read more | digg story [...]