No matter how much love something life. Food. Your house. TV shows. The same thing over and over again can be tedious.
And from time to time, it’s nice to change things up. So why can’t your computer be the same?
If you’re like me, you spend most of your time on your computer. This means that backgrounds, preferences and settings are all very important. Not only do these things say a lot about who I am but they make computing more fun.
With that in mind, I like to switch it up and use different login screens so I am not always seeing the same one every time I go to begin my workday.
Change the Login Screen Background:
First things first. Find a new image or picture that you are going to want to look at for a long time.
The reason is that you’re likely not going to have the time nor the patience to be changing it once a week.
Also, if this is for your office computer, I recommend choose something work appropriate. Once you choose your image, save it somewhere where you can find it easily.
There are different steps depending upon how new your computer is:
For 10.4 and earlier:
- Open the “Go to Folder”: Push Command→Shift → G and type in or paste:
- /Library/Desktop Pictures/
- Rename Aqua Blue to Aqua Blue2
- Now go back and find that picture that you have chosen: move it now over to the Desktop Pictures and rename it AquaBlue. It will ask you to replace the old file: click yes.
- Restart your computer and when you turn it back on your login screen will now be the new and hopefully improved picture!
For Leopard 10.5:
These steps are basically the same, it just uses a different file name and location…
- Open the terminal and enter:
- cd /System/Library/CoreServices
- sudo mv DefaultDesktop.jpg DefaultDesktop_org.jpg
- sudo cp /path/of/image.jpg DefaultDesktop.jpg
- Change /path/of/image.jpg to the path of the image file you want to use
Change the Login Screen Apple Logo:
First, find a picture or other logo you want to be put in it’s place. It must be 90×90 and a tif file. Also something to keep in mind, for best results stick with something transparent.
For 10.4 and earlier:
- Bring up the “Go to Folder” dialog: Command→ Shift
- Paste or type in:
- /System/Library/CoreServices/SecurityAgent.app/Contents/Resources/
- Find the file “applelogo.tif”
- Make a copy of the file “applelogo.tif” by holding down the option key and dragging it to your desktop.** Make sure to do this so that you can revert to the default Apple logo
- Rename your new logo file to ‘applelogo.tif’ and move it to this same Resources/ folder
- At this point you will need to enter in the administrator password.
- Restart your computer and when you login, your new logo will be there!
For 10.5 Leopard:
It is all the same, except you use this directory:
- /System/Library/CoreServices/SecurityAgentPlugins/loginwindow.bundle/Contents/Resources
To revert back to the default Apple logo, follow the same directions and replace the new logo with the original applelogo.tif file that you backed up
Change the Message for the Login Window:
Another neat trick: You can also add a message to the login window!
- First open up the terminal: Go to Utilities folder→ Applications folder→ then you will find it
- Paste or type in the following:
- sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow LoginwindowText “Hello There”
- Replace “Hello There” with your text.
Removing the text is just as easy, type or paste in:
- sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow LoginwindowText
Good luck!
Try not to get too carried away. It’s easy to 
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
in snow leopard
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow LoginwindowText
didn’t work for me. it yielded:
Rep argument is not a dictionary
Defaults have not been changed.
i worked it around with:
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow LoginwindowText “”
(empty double quotes-empty string-double quotes after LoginwindowText)
cheers!
Thank you!