10.7: Use the Linen pattern on the desktop
Oct 11, '11 07:30:00AM
Contributed by: rgetter
I do a lot of photography and video, so I prefer a simple, color-free Desktop background on my monitors. When I installed Lion, I fell in love with the basic linen texture of the login screen and decided that I need to replace that Tiger-era pattern I was using (which I had de-colored and flipped in Photoshop to give some symmetry to my dual monitors).
Here's what I did in Lion:
- The linen image is a file located in:
/System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Versions/C/Resources/NSTexturedFullScreenBackgroundColor.png
- Opened it in Preview and made it just a little lighter (personal preference)
- Saved it to my ~/Pictures folder
- Brought up 'Change Desktop Background...' by right-clicking on the Desktop.
- Selected the tile image in the Pictures folder and selected 'Tile' in the format drop-down (above the preview images).
That's it. I realize that this is just a window-dressing kind of hint, but is the best payback I can provide for all the valuable tips and fixes I've received from Mac OS X Hints over the years.
[crarko adds: Pretty straightforward. About the only thing I noticed was that I needed to either Export the file from Preview, or it also would let me make a duplicate using 'Save a version.' That's just because the file is owned by root, and read only to everyone else.]
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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20111009131105409