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Want to change your login screen? It’s easy to do it via a GTK+ greeter for the default LightDM display manager in Ubuntu 16.04.
Using LightDM GTK+ greeter instead of the default Unity greeter allows users to theming Ubuntu login screen via GTK 3 themes, and icons. And there’s a simple graphical tool to configure all the settings.
To get started:
1. Launch Ubuntu Software, search for and install “lightdm gtk greeter settings” utility:
2. After installation, launch the utility, when it opens, do:
If you’ve installed them in local user folder, run below commands to mv to system themes folder:
sudo mv ~/.themes/* /usr/share/themes/; sudo chown -R root:root /usr/share/themes/
sudo mv ~/.icons/* /usr/share/icons/; sudo chown -R root:root /usr/share/icons/
- Select GTK+ theme, icon theme, font, background image, etc in Appearance tab.
- Adjust clock format, indicators in Panel tab.
- Adjust login box position, on-screen keyboard, reader, screen blank timeout, etc in the rest of tabs.
After all, restart your computer (first time only) to apply changes.
Restore the default Login Screen:
To restore the default Unity Greeter login screen, open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run the command:
sudo apt remove lightdm-gtk-greeter && sudo apt autoremove
The command removes GTK+ greeter, the configure utility, and restore your login screen to the previous state after reboot.
This is a very nice start to an introduction to modifying our GTK+ Greeter configuration but, when I ran the suggested command line command to put themes and icons where GTK+ Greeter could access them it reported that the ~/.themes and ~/.icons directories do not exist. If you could provide your readers with some instructions as to how to create and populate these directories with some beautiful themes and icons this would be a more complete introduction for beginners.
That’s meaning you don’t have any GTK and icon themes installed on your local folder. But you can get some either from gnome-look.org (select GTK and icon themes from left panel) or by searching on Google.
Normally, we can install Themes to:
1. /usr/share/themes directory for GTK theme, /usr/share/icons for icon theme — for global (system-wide) use.
2. or install to .themes or .icons for single user only. Need to manually create the folders for the first time.
And the suggested commands in the tutorial is for those who have already installed some GTK+ / Icon themes in the local .themes and .icons folders, to move them to system-wide directories so that they can be used in GTK greeter settings utility.
Removing the package did not restore my default Ubuntu Unity 16.04 login screen.
Try also:
sudo apt remove lightdm-gtk-greeter && sudo apt autoremoveto remove unnecessary dependencies. And this do restore the default Unity Greeter in my 16.04 64-bit laptop
Try removing the gtk-greeter with also autoremove command:
sudo apt remove lightdm-gtk-greeter && sudo apt autoremovewhich also removes unnecessary dependencies. This do work in my 64-bit 16.04 laptop
Hi. When I try to change the background image it shows a white background instead of my chosen image. How can I fix it?
I tried this, it changed the greeter as in when i log out its changed. BUT the main thing i wanted was to change the greeter that i see on startup, unfortunately that stayed as the default unity greeter….any ideas anyone?
I have gnome desktop installed if that makes any odds.