Comment 0 for bug 470026

You should be able to change the brown look of login screen, just like you could in previous Ubuntu releases.

I had custom a GDM theme that was completely overwritten by the new login screen. I tried to find some tool to get the custom theme back or at least sanitize the login screen from the brown look, but currently I can't, not entirely at least.

The login screen is sensible to the GTK theme currently set for the gdm user, so if you run $gksu -u gdm dbus-launch gnome-appearance-properties, you can change appearance of the controls, and the background image. But there's a problem: after typing enter to log in, that brown background is still displayed as a splash screen. I'm not sure though if removing the static splash screen would be the last hack I needed to effectively get the brown look removed.

Either way, there should be a human-friendly way to do it. My suggestion is a simple checkbox displayed in System > Preferences > Appearance when the user has admin rights, something like "Apply current theme for the login screen". Another option would be having that checkbox in System > Administration > Login Screen. When checked, the brown splash screen should be replaced with the chosen background or some neutral stuff.