greeter design improvements

[geofft]

One of the things we keep talking about doing (and recently have started talking about doing later) is improving the background image of the greeter.

One big issue is that it's a raster image that stretches to the size of the screen and has artifacts when stretched. It'll probably look a little prettier if we either make a huge image that scales down, and a lot prettier if we replace it with an SVG which will scale nicely.

Another concept we've discussed is photographs of MIT. Lots of people have volunteered to take pretty pictures. We should ask them to take pretty pictures.

[jdreed]

Another concept we've discussed is photographs of MIT.
Lots of people have volunteered to take pretty pictures. We should ask them to take pretty pictures.

The News Office has a bunch of stock photos of campus (ie: Lobby 7, Killian, etc) available for no charge if it's MIT use. It might be worth talking to them and seeing what's available.

Also, when we next revisit the greeter, we should replace the text at the bottom with something that doesn't say "Athena 10". Probably just the two icons and text in the center that says "Information Services & Technology" and "Student Information Processing Board" or something. (This probably still wants to be an image, as it is now, because gdm's relative positioning code is pretty terrible for anything other than dead center.)

[jdreed]

Also, when we do this, we should specify the actual fonts that we want. The current theme specifies Trebuchet, which is part of msttcorefonts, and we don't really want that, so we should be sure we pick a font that's installed by default.

[jdreed]

We need to completely redo gdm-config for Karmic, and we're unlikely to have time to redo the greeter between than and now. Closing as wontfix.