Does a 3D animated login screen sound cool to you?
Robert Ancell, the developer behind LightDM (Ubuntu 11.10’s new login manager) demoed a 3D animated login screen as part of his talk at the Desktop Summit in Berlin, Germany, last month.
The crowd ‘greeter’ (as LightDM refers to login screens) he put together allows you log in to your desktop by clicking on animated Imps.
No, seriously. Watch:
Impressive, eh? (‘groan’ – the world)
The good news for LightDM/Ubuntu 11.10 fans is that Robert has made his ‘fun’ greeter available in a PPA, and provided full instructions for adding, installing and enabling the greeter from the command line.
- sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lightdm-team/crowd-greeter
- sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install crowd-greeter
- sudo edit /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf
- Set ‘greeter-session=crowd-greeter’ in [SeatDefaults] section.
- Restart machine
Do note that the greeter is not ‘stable’, meaning the Imps are liable to sneak out into your system and do damage. #justsayin
Once you’ve had enough of gormless-imps wandering your login screen you can revert the changes by setting the ‘greeter-session’ above back to ‘unity-greeter‘.