You're Here! Great!
Now let's start beautificating your GDM with dualhead mplayer love!
THE PROBLEM
If you like I have two monitors but have chosen not to run xinerama
GDM will be very displeased with you. It will happily display itself
properly on the primary monitor, but the secondary will be plagued by
the raw X background, which I believe can cause severe fits of hypertension
if stared at too long.
THE FIX
Be root and simply cd on down to /etc/gdm/Init/ and open the file Default
with your favourite editor and place your cursor below the comments.
If you like I run Ion, then after you've logged in the secondary monitor
inherits the raw X background, so first we'll add a simple background.
I use bsetroot which accompanies blackbox, however that can be exchanged
with any other, such as Esetroot or xsetroot, albeit with different syntax.
/usr/bin/bsetroot -display :0.1 -gradient interlacedflatcrossdiagonalgradient -to rgb:00/00/3c -from 00/00/9
If you don't start your X server on display 0, be sure to edit the above line accordingly.
Beneath that line is where the magic happens, here we enter this line:
/usr/bin/mplayer -fs -vo xv -display :0.1 /usr/local/share/debian_logo.avi -loop 0 < /dev/null &
This line merits some explaining. The option -fs will run the video fullscreened.
The option -vo xv will play it using the X Video extension, and if you would rather
use a different video out you can run mplayer -vo help to see which ones you have
available. Otherwise install the appropriate -dev package, and recompile mplayer.
The option -display :0.1 tells mplayer to play it on the secondary screen of display 0.
The file debian_logo.avi can be downloaded here and is a 1024x768 xvid encoded video.
It is created by the magical Ice who can be reached via msg or memoserv on irc.chatsociety.net
He does however grant Free non-commercial usage of the animation by any and all humans.
I should also note it goes quite well with the GDM theme debblue (WITHOUT the fucking facebrowser!)
The option -loop 0 makes the video loop continuously infinitely. An important note however:
if you place -loop before the filename, the video window will close and reopen for each iteration
whereas placing -loop 0 after the filename creates a smooth unbroken continuous animation.
The remaining < /dev/null &, is simply the way to run mplayer in the background, thus letting
GDM go on with the most excellent job of providing you with a login. Without it GDM won't start
until you manually quit mplayer.
Now you should have a beautificated GDM displaying proper debian love and other things, how sexy!