LarsBlog

Today I spent a bit of time customising an install of Eeebuntu Standard Edition 3.0.  It's very nice, but one thing I didn't like was the default desktop background.  This is easy enough to change, however whenever I lock the machine, the background behind the unlock dialog is the old default one.  It took me some digging around to find where to set this, it's in the XML file /etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults/%gconf-tree.xml.  Just edit the lines below to set the background image or colour you want:

<dir name="background">
    <entry name="secondary_color" mtime="1242245716" schema="/schemas/desktop/gnome/background/secondary_color" type="string">
        <stringvalue>#b0b068684040</stringvalue>
    </entry>
    <entry name="primary_color" mtime="1242245716" schema="/schemas/desktop/gnome/background/primary_color" type="string">
        <stringvalue>#000000000000</stringvalue>
    </entry>
    <entry name="picture_options" mtime="1242245716" schema="/schemas/desktop/gnome/background/picture_options" type="string">
        <stringvalue>zoom</stringvalue>
    </entry>
    <entry name="picture_opacity" mtime="1242245716" schema="/schemas/desktop/gnome/background/picture_opacity" type="int" value="100"/>
    <entry name="picture_filename" mtime="1242245716" schema="/schemas/desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename" type="string">
        <stringvalue>/usr/share/backgrounds/eb3/EEEbuntu.xml</stringvalue>
    </entry>
    <entry name="draw_background" mtime="1242245716" schema="/schemas/desktop/gnome/background/draw_background" type="bool" value="true"/>
    <entry name="color_shading_type" mtime="1242245716" schema="/schemas/desktop/gnome/background/color_shading_type" type="string">
        <stringvalue>solid</stringvalue>
    </entry>
</dir>

Note - in Eeebuntu, the default background image is an XML file that configures gnome to display different background images at different times (in this case, a sky image with various shades between light and dark).  If this background image can't be found, it will fall back to displaying the colour in "primary_color".  I assume the above would also work for regular Ubuntu.