PART 1: Customizing the graphics in Grub, Usplash, Xsplash and GDM.

[Eddie Lee]

Thank you VERY MUCH for this tutorial, I appreciate your effort very much, as others before me I too am running Lucid instead of Karmic, I know it could be a lot of work to do a complete update of your guide from Karmic to Lucid, but, could you please post a list of things we should be aware of as well of things we need to work specific to Lucid?

I am too kind of new to Linux/Ubuntu and never done this kind of "deep" customization so your work its very much appreciated, please keep up the good work .

[towheedm]

Thank you. Keep in mind that XSplash was removed in Lucid and USplash was replaced with Plymouth. The Grub and GDM customizations should work fine in Lucid. Unfortunately, I cannot do a tutorial on Plymouth at this time because of my nVidia card. I'm looking into changing my card or just wait until the Nouveau drivers works properly with the nVidia card.

[jcoles]

Be careful about copying command lines out of the PDF and pasting them into a terminal.

I thought a command wasn't working. When I pasted it into a forum reply, I saw this:

sudo *u gdm gconftool*2 --**type bool **--set /apps/gdm/simple*-greeter/disable_user_list true

I had copied the line from the PDF with evince, and pasted the command into the Gnome Terminal. The hyphens were missing, so I added them back, but I saw no asterisks.

When I typed the command instead, it worked. (or was accepted, at least. I haven't rebooted yet!)

Even copy/paste doesn't work properly in Ubuntu. That's pretty lame.

[jcoles]

Thanks, towheedm!

I thought that the GDM greeter was "hard-coded" because I couldn't find any config files for it. I have only used one command from your document and it did the job perfectly.

gconf is too much like the infamous Windows registry. The traditional Linux practice of plain text configuration files is much more open and accessible.

[towheedm]

You're welcome. Glad it worked for you.

And yes, gconf is very similar to the Windows registry. Unfortunately. a lot of stuff in GDM 2.28 and above has been hard-coded and cannot be changed short of modifying the appropriate file and re-compiling. This is not an easy task for the normal everyday user who is not familiar with compiling.

Luckily, some stuff can be changed which allows us to do limited customization of the GDM. This is moving more and more towards what Microsoft did with XP when they decided to lock down changes to the start-up screen and to the Windows themes. Eventually someone will do a patch like was done for XP that allowed users to completely change the start-up screen and the Windows themes.

[joabar]

Hello towheedm,

First of all thanks a LOT for your incredible dedication on this. I feel very identified with all your work since I am a design enthusiast, and I'm constantly looking for making my ubuntu more and more eye-friendly.

I don't know if you have seen this but anyways it worth to see. I hope it helps you and therefore, help us! haha

Good luck and thanks again.

[towheedm]

Thanks for the link joabar. Will try this in a few minutes.

I have a triple boot setup using Karmic, XP and Lucid. Karmic is my main OS so Grub is configured from here. The grub settings in the link you provided has been my default settings for grub. Booting into Lucid with these settings never worked for me.

I'll try the procedures in the link within the link you provided. Thanks for the info.

[Eddie Lee]

Thank you. Keep in mind that XSplash was removed in Lucid and USplash was replaced with Plymouth. The Grub and GDM customizations should work fine in Lucid. Unfortunately, I cannot do a tutorial on Plymouth at this time because of my nVidia card. I'm looking into changing my card or just wait until the Nouveau drivers works properly with the nVidia card.

Oh I see, well I also have a nVidia card so I guess Ill wait for that too, thanks

[jim0watkins]

I see the file has been downloaded 85 times. Anyone care to post any comments or remarks? I am thinking of expanding it to include Lucid and Plymouth. I would like to know whether there's enough interest in it before I invest any time into it.

Thanks.

Awesome! I love your posts towheedm, they are perfect for me. Just wondering before I start, does it matter that I'm using Lucid as dual-boot with Vista. I'll probably be getting rid of Vista sometime in the next few months (probably during xmas break), I'm just waiting on some help to figure out how to do that, and I'm not sure how all these changes can affect that.

I also saw that some people found these steps to work well with Lucid, but what's plymouth, I thought the latest release was maverick?

Thanks a lot for all your work! J.

[clockworktri]

I would love it if you would explain Lucid and Plymouth! I've been trying to customize plymouth but I can't get it to do what I want...