How to configure lightdm greeter theme

Ubuntu uses Lightdm as the display manager. Ubuntu also uses it’s default lightdm-greeter (The UI that is displayed as User Login Page) which is named unity-greeter.

Last month, I installed several DE (Desktop Environment) namely Lubuntu, LXDE, KDE, GNOME-SHELL, razor-qt and some others. As I installed those, I noticed, the default unity-greeter can’t show all the available option for choosing DE. That was really frustrating. But, Anyhow, I managed to change the default lightdm theme in KDE system settings (That was an awesome option). But for a full understanding I played with it yesterday and am writing about how to change it’s themes to suit your tasted

##Available greeter themes

There are several greeter themes available. Namely

• Unity greeter theme (default)
• KDE lightdm greeter
• GTK greeter
• webkit greeter theme For a more complete list, visit this link in wikipedia

##Installing greeter themes

• KDE greeter

        sudo apt-get install lightdm-kde-greeter
  

• GTK greeter

        sudo apt-get install lightdm-gtk-greeter
  

• Webkit

        sudo apt-get install lightdm-webkit-greeter
  

• RazorQt greeter

        sudo apt-get install razorqt-lightdm-greeter
  

##Changing the greeter themes Go to /usr/share/xgreeters/ directory and check what greeter themes are available there with .desktop extension. Note the name of the greeter file. Now open /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf with root permission and under SeatDefaults section (Yes, it is not setDefaults) change or add a line greeter-session=lightdm-gtk-greeter (assuming you wanted to use gtk-greeter).

##Changing further in lightdm-gtk-greeter Lightdm gtk greeter has several alternative variants. If you use gtk-greeter, you can configure theme by using this command in a terminal

    sudo update-alternatives --config lightdm-gtk-greeter-config-derivative

For a full tutorial on lightdm, check Ubuntu-wiki page on Lightdm