Tame the linen in Lion

Apples latest iteration of it's famous desktop OS seems to have a really deep relationship to the linen texture introduced with the current generation of iOS.

Personally, I like it the same way I liked the good old brushed metal look in earlier versions: It doesn't bother me.

Since others some people don't agree with me and Lucy asked me if there is a way to change or remove that texture I started digging. The first place I started looking was the Dock.app as the Dock handled Expose and Dashboard in previous versions. It turned out I was right, Dock.app also handles Mission Control and contains the tile image I was looking for.

If you want to change that image, just replace defaultdesktop.png in

System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/

with an image of your liking and the same dimensions as the original.

Step by step using Terminal.app

Attention: If you don't know how to use the Terminal and don't know how to fix thing if you mess it up, please wait until someone writes a little application which allows you to do this without turning your Mac into an unusable block of aluminum. The chances this could happen are pretty low, and I'll try to keep the explanation simple.

So let's start.

Create a replacement image and save it to your Desktop as defaultdesktop.png It must be 256px*256px and a standard PNG file.
Switch to the directory the original is stored.

cd /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/
Rename the original to have a backup (you will have to enter your password as we have to use sudo to modify system files)

sudo mv defaultdesktop.png defaultdesktop_backup.png
Move your new image from step 1 from your desktop to the correct location

sudo mv ~/Desktop/defaultdesktop.png .
Restart the Dock to apply the changes

killall Dock

Wait until the Dock is loaded again, launch Mission Control and enjoy your very own background.

Again, I'm not responsible for any damage made by incorrect or inexperienced usage of Terminal.app or any other steps described here.

Extra

As always, I searched the web after I started to poke around myself and so it didn't surprise me that others have found the same solution to the problem and I'm definitely not the first one. They also found the location of the texture from the login screen which can be replaced in the same way (with adjusted pahts/names of course) as described above and is located here:

/System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Versions/C/Resources/NSTexturedFullScreenBackgroundColor.png

Found on Quora. You will have to log out and in or even restart to change that image.

Small update

Out of curiosity I tried using a bigger tile (in my case: 512*512px) to replace defaultdesktop.png and it worked fine for me.

So long