I don’t know when did it happen, but at some point, Gnome dialog to set the background (gnome-appearance-properties) lost the ability to change GDM background too.
I believe that wasn’t the best known feature of that dialog, but I used it in Fedora 12 (if I recall correctly), and you can check that it was available in Fedora 11 too. But now it’s gone.
You can change the background anyway, using the adequate configuration key in gconf for the gdm user:
$ sudo -u gdm gconftool-2 --set --type string \ /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename \ /usr/share/backgrounds/cosmos/earth-horizon.jpg
I’ve found it in the Arch Linux wiki page for Gnome 2.28, and it works!
OK, I know that’s not the end of the world, but in the same way there are small new features that make you feel a project is going forward and life’s wonderful, there are steps backwards like this that are really frustrating.
I know it’s silly, but I feel better now that I changed the background of the display manager of my Linux system (although it used to be easier than that!).
