This tutorial will help you to install multiple display managers on the Ubuntu desktop. Also provides you instructions to switch between display managers.

What is Display Manager?

A Display Manager is a graphical login program and session manager that is responsible for user authentication. It is a totally separate application from the desktop environment.

Display Manager is also known as “login manager”. In this tutorial, we will discuss 3 popular display managers that are GDM, SDDM, and LightDM. Some of the display managers are installed by default with the desktop environment.

1. GDM3: is the default display manager for Gnome Desktop Environment
2. LightDM: is the an lightweight and opensource display manager
3. SDDM: is a display manager for the X11 and Wayland windowing systems. KDE Plasma 5 is using this as default display manager.

Installing Display Manager on Ubuntu

Although, multiple Display Managers are available for the Ubuntu desktop environment. But we would focus on three prominent ones – GDM, LightDM, XDM, and SDDM. GDM (GDM3) is the default Display Manager for Ubuntu 16.10 and newer versions. Still, some of the other Ubuntu flavors prefer to use LightDM as the default display manager.

Use one of the below commands to install Display Manager on the Ubuntu system.

• Installing GDM3:

  sudo apt install gdm3 
  

• Installing LightDM:

  sudo apt install lightdm 
  

• Installing SDDM:

  sudo apt install sddm 
  

Switching Display Manager on Ubuntu

During the installation of the display manager, the installer will prompt to change the default display manager.

After installation, you can also switch the display manager with the below-mentioned command. Open a terminal and type:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure gdm 

Use the UP + DOWN keys to select the display manager and hit the Ok button.

In case the above command fails, you can directly edit the /etc/X11/default-display-manager file and set the new display manager.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we have discussed the popular display managers for the Linux desktop environment. Also provides you the instruction to install and switch display managers on a Ubuntu system.

The post Switching Display Manager in Ubuntu – GDM, LightDM & SDDM appeared first on TecAdmin.

This tutorial will help you to change the default login screen background on Ubuntu systems.

Install Required Tools

First of all, install a required library on your system.

sudo apt install libglib2.0-dev-bin

Now download the script that will help you with setting up the login screen background wallpaper on Ubuntu systems.

wget -qO - https://github.com/PRATAP-KUMAR/ubuntu-gdm-set-background/archive/main.tar.gz | tar zx --strip-components=1 ubuntu-gdm-set-background-main/ubuntu-gdm-set-background 

To find out the command help run the following command:

./ubuntu-gdm-set-background --help 

Change the Login Screen Background

You can set an image, solid color, and horizontal or vertical gradient color at the Ubuntu login screen running with Genome display manager (GDM).

Use one of the following commands to change the login screen background of your choice:

• Set an image – Use the following command to set an image to the login background.

  sudo ./ubuntu-gdm-set-background --image /home/user/backgrounds/image.jpg 
  

• Set a solid color – You can also set an solid color to Ubuntu login screen. Use the following command with hex color code. You can generate hex code here.

  sudo ./ubuntu-gdm-set-background --color \#aAbBcC 
  

• Set a horizontal gradient color – It also allows you to make gradient color with two colors. To set the horizontal gradent use following command:

  sudo ./ubuntu-gdm-set-background --gradient horizontal \#aAbBcC \#dDeEfF 
  

• Set a vertical gradient color – Vertical gradient of two colors can be set with command:

  sudo ./ubuntu-gdm-set-background --gradient vertical \#aAbBcC \#dDeEfF 
  

• Reset all changes – You can reset all changes to the original by running command:

  sudo ./ubuntu-gdm-set-background --reset 
  

Here are a few screenshots of the login screen after setting up with the above commands.

Conclusion

This tutorial helped you with changing the login screen background with custom colors on Ubuntu systems. You can revert all changes anytime to get the default login screen.

The post Changing the Login Screen Background in Ubuntu 22.04 & 20.04 appeared first on TecAdmin.