On Sun, 2021-12-12 at 17:30 -0500, Sam Varshavchik wrote:
In the end, it didn't matter. I attempted to create $HOME/.face
myself, using just the available tools, namely gimp, by cropping and
saving my mug shot. I failed, since gimp was very confused by my
attempts to save a jpg- formatted image as $HOME/.face, going only as
far as $HOME/.jpg, so I relented and renamed it manually. In the end,
nothing changed, and the greeter still showed the default, feature-
less profile picture. I even rebooted, so, who knows what the problem
is. Maybe it has to be a .gif. Maybe it has to be .png. Maybe it is
being blocked by SELinux, who knows.
On *this* installation (MATE on CentOS, my other computer runs Fedora,
and it's not switched on right now), ~/.face is a PNG file (some gadget
it created it in that format when I picked my image).
But that approach suffers from various file permissions problems, as
you've discovered: Your home directory, and that file, would need to
be world readable for the login greeter to be able read that file. I
don't allow world-readable home directories.
At some stage I discovered that the MATE login greeter can read user
icons from "/var/lib/AccountsService/icons/", so I put files in there
for users with the same filename as the username, plus a png suffix.
e.g. Mine is /var/lib/AccountsService/icons/tim.png
All the user icons in that directory are owned by root:root.
I don't recall how I discovered that, nor if I had to do anything else
to make that work (I suspect I didn't, it just looks there). It might
even be done by one of the "about me" menu items in MATE. Placing
appropriately named image files in that directory might work for other
login greeters.
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