HELP me dig into the system to find a certain file

R

rene

Registered
hi ya all :)
I am looking for a certain picture file in the system of OS X.
Namely; that ugly blueish graypurple desktop background with wich X starts up.
The one that is there right from the start, NOT the desktop pic of your own choice
wich loads a little later.
I love bright colors and would like to replace it.
Any body knows where to find it?

Thanx!
rene
http://members.ams.chello.nl/rmollema
 
Here are my thoughts on finding that file:

It may be that the blue color drawn during startup is hard-coded into some startup process. (My guess is by the Window Manager process itself, though it might also be from loginwindow.app). But hopefully Apple has provided for startup screens and has not hard-coded a single color. That would be too bad.

If such a file exists, your best bet would be to search through all the files that get read during startup. To my knowledge, Sherlock can not search for files based on access time (as opposed to modify time), so to compile such a list, you have to use the find command from the terminal.
find / -atime -n will find all files last accessed less than n minutes ago.
So reboot your system, noting the time at which the reboot happens. Then once it has booted, find all files accessed during the reboot. You might want to redirect the find output to a file (find / -atime -3 > files.txt puts a list of all files accessed within the last three minutes in the file files.txt). Then you can search this file for things that might be image files.

Or you could just look in all the folders and .app bundles in /System/Library/StartupItems, but that will take longer, and is not as exhaustive as the find method.

Hope this helps,

Zach

 
its inside Desktop.app

/System/Library/CoreServices/Desktop.app/Contents/Resources/Desktop Picture.qtif

good luck finding something thatll open it though... the only thing I have is the carbon QT PictureViewer thats in /Developer/Applications/

.....Ah, nevermind, I see what he means now.. another place to look might be in the defaults.. type defaults domains at a terminal prompt and see if anything looks interesting

I doubt its an image file; if its settable at all itll probably be in a .plist somewhere.

[Edited by endian on 01-05-2001 at 05:36 PM]
 
thanks you guys,
I am not good with the terminal though, so I
might just let it slip.
( I\'ll keep hoping someone knows the actual name and
location though)
cheers, rene
 
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