up vote 6 down vote favorite
4

I installed Ubuntu Studio 15.10 and upon that:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

Now on the login screen, I have the default brownish Ubuntu default background.

  • I tried this as root:

    sudo xhost +SI:localuser:lightdm
sudo su lightdm -s /bin/bash
gsettings set com.canonical.unity-greeter background /usr/share/backgrounds/Tranquil_by_Pat_David.jpg

    But this didn't change anything.

  • Also starting the unity-control-center as user lightdm and changing the background there had no effect.

  • I also checked the rights of /usr/share/backgrounds/Tranquil_by_Pat_David.jpg which are globally readable.

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This is a Duplicate – T04435 Nov 5 '15 at 10:45
2  
It is not a duplicate, I tried everything in that question – rubo77 Nov 5 '15 at 11:01
1  
Maybe a bit duplicate indeed, cause the answer was in one of the low voted answers: askubuntu.com/a/360008/34298 – rubo77 Nov 5 '15 at 11:08
    
I've updated my answer, please refer – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy Nov 18 '15 at 4:41
up vote 14 down vote

The proper way of changing default unity-greeter background is through overriding glib-2.0 schema, as specified in the Lightdm Ubuntu Wiki

The steps are as follows:

  1. Create /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/10_unity_greeter_background.gschema.override file with the following contents:

    [com.canonical.unity-greeter]
draw-user-backgrounds=false
background='/foo/wallpaper.png'

  2. Run sudo glib-compile-schemas /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas

  3. Reboot or login to TTY2 (accessed by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F2 ) and run sudo service lightdm restart

This has been tested on my Ubuntu 14.04

Update: November 17 2015

I have put together a script that simplifies the process of changing the greeter background. It has been tested in its final form on two versions of Ubuntu, 14.04 LTS (actual physical machine ) and 15.10 (Virtual Machine ) It can be found in my GitHub

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Thanks for your script! It, however, produces this error when running. – orschiro Oct 6 '16 at 6:21
1  
@orschiro you have to call script with path to file. For example, sudo ./chgreeterbg.sh /home/user/Picture s/wallpaper1.png – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy Oct 6 '16 at 6:31
    
That works, thanks! Maybe you want to add this to your answer? – orschiro Oct 6 '16 at 7:10
    
After running your script and rebooting, my font settings have changed. Do you know how I can restore them? – orschiro Oct 6 '16 at 7:20
1  
This also works for Ubuntu 16.04. Be careful about typos - I had a typo in the schema name within the .gschema.override file, which is the part between the brackets [ ], and as a result it was not properly loading. Once I fixed that I had the correct background. – jropella May 9 '17 at 8:49
up vote 2 down vote

It seems like all the gsettings have no effect in Ubuntu 15.10, (maybe because I installed Ubuntu Studio with xfce4 first).

I solved it by adding this line to /etc/lightdm/lightdm-gtk-greeter.conf:

background=/usr/share/backgrounds/Tranquil_by_Pat_David.jpg

or in one sudo command:

sudo su -c 'echo "background=/usr/share/backgrounds/Tranquil_by_Pat_David.jpg">>/etc/lightdm/lightdm-gtk-greeter.conf'
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up vote 0 down vote

The non coder way is to use Ubuntu Tweak. Still available per the method listed in this answer.

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