Dear Aunt TUAW: I need a prettier lock screen

Dear Aunt TUAW,

I wanted to ask if Auntie TUAW could look into how to change the lion lock screen. Many sites show different lock screens. My lock screen is just black and I wanted to change it so if you could look into it I would appreciate it thanks.

Your loving nephew,

LaRonn B

Dear LaRonn,

Yes, you can customize your lock screen. And you can do this in several ways. For example, you can add a custom message. Open System Preferences > Security & Privacy > General. Click the lock, authenticate, and then use this option to show custom text.

Auntie suspects that's not entirely what you're looking for, however. So here's another approach you might take. In the same Security & Privacy settings, check the Require password option. This makes the lock screen activate as soon as your screen goes to sleep.

With this option, once your screen sleeps, the lockscreen not only activates but does so over your current screen background. Pretty, isn't it? It's hard to see here, but there's even a status display at the top-right corner of the screen.

You can sleep your screen using an Expose smart corner (Preferences > Mission Control > Hot Corners) or you can use the Control-Shift-Eject sequence. If your keyboard doesn't support that, you can go completely geeky and write your own command line utility.

*kof*.

For the curious, if you ever need a screenshot of your lockscreen, you can ssh in from another computer. Make sure the screen is active, so the login prompt is shown, and then use /usr/sbin/screencapture from the command line with one argument, a path to the destination file.

Hugs,

Auntie T.