We’ve covered the manual method of turning your menu bar white and also pointed you towards the more automatic fashion offered by LeoColorBar. But you might think that there’s some sneaky, arcane command-line methodology for doing the same thing.
And you’d be right.
Blogger Steve Miner has dug up the necessary alteration, which involves editing the com.apple.WindowsServer.plist file in /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/. As Derik would insist I point out, this means fooling around with files in the /System directory—you should back up /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowsServer.plist before trying the command. A reader on Steve’s blog, Krioni, provided the single command for doing this yourself (this should be all on one line):
sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer ‘EnvironmentVariables’ -dict ‘CI_NO_BACKGROUND_IMAGE’ 1
You’ll need to reboot for it to take effect. Again, this hack is totally unsupported, and you’re taking your system into your own hands by altering it. I’ve given it a shot, however, and confirm that, if nothing else, it does work (even if, shhhhh, I totally forgot to backup first). Take that for what you will.
Is that supposed to be CINOBACKGROUND_IMAGE or CI_NO_BACKGROUND_IMAGE?
I think your autoformatting has screwed up something there.
@Paul: Whoops, yeah should be the latter. Fixed, thanks for the catch.
So do you have to do something to undo a CINOBACKGROUND change (other that reverting to your backup, of course :)?
I would presume (though I haven't tried it) that you just swap the "1" for a "0" and you're all set. But if that doesn't work, that's why you have the backup. ;)
Would this change break any other "features"? Are there other applications, daemons, etc. that is dependent on that environment variable?
It's working great on my Mac, but I'm just concerned whether it'll break something else down the line.
Thanks for the tip!
I read elsewhere (Ars/Infinite Loop Comments) that the number at the end can be a fractional value, hence a gradient. To get close to the original Tiger gradient use 0.62.
I don't have 10.5 yet, so I am unable to try this.
Cheers.
If you travel to the Blogger site linked in the original file, you will see that several people have locked up their computer with this hack. I used BBEdit and Unix commands to carefully set up the file and it locked up on me. It took single user mode, file mount and Unix copy commands restore the backup that I had. I wonder if 10.5.1 is incompatible? Good luck to you if this works (at least until the next system update) for you.
I wish people would get over this non-issue already. The menu bar is translucent, just as the taskbar in Vista. So what? Live with it.
I personally don't mind it. Just choose a wallpaper that looks good with it and problem over.
Certainly it beats hacking your OS.