How to make Debian GNU / Linux Squeeze (GNOME)
GDM to show avatar graphical icons login
By default latest Debian
GDM does not provide an automatic
way to login using user AVATARS (like Windows does).
This is pretty strange, especially if you compare to Ubuntu and
many other Linux distributions which already has support for
AVATAR login via GDM
The reason for this is that currently Debian is shipped with old
version of
gdm2 and this gdm version does not have support
for clickable login avatars.
Debian looks by default like this:
Thanksfully this
non-user friendly GNOME login screen
behaviour can be changed by simply installing
gdm3
root@debian:~# apt-get --yes install gdm3
...
This will remove the old
gdm installed package as well as
fast-user-switch-applet and install the gdm3.
Having installed the gdm3 with configured a background will look
like so:
I was quite stunned that
gdm3< does not have included support
for themes . As far as I've spoken with some ppl in
irc.freenode #gnome the reason for this oddity is it crashed a lot
when a theme is configred.
By default the gdm2 themes are provided by a package called
gdm-themes, since gdm3 does not support themes (yet), the
package
gdm3-themes is missing.