Yes thats what I thought the moment I discovered that the Slim login manager in #! comes with themes that change the way login screen shows up on boot. The default theme “waldorf” is bland yet again. So based on my new found information, I decided to spice it a bit.
Slim is the login manager for Crunchbang. Slim home page has few themes which can be tried out. And the cool thing is they also have a how-to to create some themes of your own.
I dived right in. Curious to see what I could put together. The themes are pretty simplistic having a background.jpg ( or png ), a panel.png and a slim.theme file. The theme file is just a simple property file for different variables which slim uses to position the panel on the screen and display the text box for username and password input.
The background image could be any of your favorite desktop images. The panel png image can be a bit tricky. I struggled a bit on GIMP to create one to my liking. The next steps involve tweaking the slim.theme for x, y positions where the panel png will get displayed and also position where to accept the user input. After some trial and error I managed to coincide the coordinates to display input right over the text box image on the panel.
Some key variables I changed are
input_name_x
input_name_y
input_name_color
to make the input overlap with the text box displayed on panel image and have different font color. And
username_x
username_y
password_x
password_y
to align the username and password msgs to align to the left of the text box image. I also fiddled with the font size a bit.
All it took was follow some instructions on Slim theme how-to page to get from
to
Here is my panel.png file. Feel free to use or edit it some more.
Now logging into Crunchbang is even more fun.
Leisure Linux 