[SOLVED] GNOME 3.16 + GDM Login & Background Image

Question

It's being surprisingly difficult to understand what's needed in order to have a login screen that does not contain the default noise PNG as background.
Apparently now the default theme is a gresource so common css overwrite don't seem to make it.
How did you folks solved this problem?
Apologies if already discussed, it's just that the problem is NOT the GNOME Desktop Background, and NOT the lock screen, just ONLY the gdm background screen during login.
Other tricks seem to not work neither:
sudo -u gdm dbus-launch gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.screensaver picture-uri '/new/picture.png'
Thanks for any sort of help with this and Best Regards
Last edited by WebReflection (2015-05-06 19:00:05)

Answer 1

I finally got this to work. The wiki needs updating as of now it only states that gnome shell theme is now in a binary format, but not how to extract and repack it afterwards...
Anyway this is how i got it to work.
Use this script to extract gnome-shell-theme inside your choosen working directory
extractgst.sh
#! /bin/sh
#change workdir to suit your system
workdir=/home/merlin/temp/GS/test
gst=/usr/share/gnome-shell/gnome-shell-theme.gresource
mkdir theme
for r in `gresource list $gst`; do
gresource extract $gst $r >$workdir${r/#\/org\/gnome\/shell/}
done
Once you've run the script you should have the theme extracted to the theme folder which was created inside your workdir.
Now you can proceed to add a background image to this folder and edit gnome-shell.css by following the wiki page.
You must now create the file gnome-shell-theme.gresource.xml inside the theme directory. Simply copy paste the xml code below into  gnome-shell-theme.gresource.xml,  making sure to change the line that refers to your background image. On my system the background image is named login-background.jpg
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<gresources>
<gresource prefix="/org/gnome/shell/theme">
<file>calendar-arrow-left.svg</file>
<file>calendar-arrow-right.svg</file>
<file>calendar-today.svg</file>
<file>checkbox-focused.svg</file>
<file>checkbox-off-focused.svg</file>
<file>checkbox-off.svg</file>
<file>checkbox.svg</file>
<file>close-window.svg</file>
<file>close.svg</file>
<file>corner-ripple-ltr.png</file>
<file>corner-ripple-rtl.png</file>
<file>dash-placeholder.svg</file>
<file>filter-selected-ltr.svg</file>
<file>filter-selected-rtl.svg</file>
<file>gnome-shell.css</file>
<file>gnome-shell-high-contrast.css</file>
<file>logged-in-indicator.svg</file>
<file>login-background.jpg</file>
<file>more-results.svg</file>
<file>no-events.svg</file>
<file>no-notifications.svg</file>
<file>noise-texture.png</file>
<file>page-indicator-active.svg</file>
<file>page-indicator-inactive.svg</file>
<file>page-indicator-checked.svg</file>
<file>page-indicator-hover.svg</file>
<file>process-working.svg</file>
<file>running-indicator.svg</file>
<file>source-button-border.svg</file>
<file>summary-counter.svg</file>
<file>toggle-off-us.svg</file>
<file>toggle-off-intl.svg</file>
<file>toggle-on-us.svg</file>
<file>toggle-on-intl.svg</file>
<file>ws-switch-arrow-up.png</file>
<file>ws-switch-arrow-down.png</file>
</gresource>
</gresources>
now the only thing left to do is to run
cd ./theme
glib-compile-resources gnome-shell-theme.gresource.xml
It will create a gresource file that you can swap in /usr/share/gnome-shell.
Good luck and hopefully I will save many some headache. Took me quite a while to get the whole thing working
Last edited by atrotet (2015-05-06 04:49:36)