gdm login screen: how to output current IP address

January 29, 2009 gnome 2 Comments

I could not find a way to put some text (for example, current IP address) into background of the gdm login screen. ImageMagic to the rescue:

cd /usr/share/gdm/themes/MyTheme
convert -draw \
  "text 10,50 \"`ifconfig wlan1 | awk '/inet addr/{ print $2 }'`\"" \
  background.jpg background.hacked.jpg

Put that line into some startup script (for example, /etc/gdm/Init/Default). Then, change your theme xml (/usr/share/gdm/themes/MyTheme/mytheme.xml) to refer to background.hacked.jpg (instead of background.jpg). Voila.