Conky semi-transparent background-color?

[hachel]

Hi there,
first off: transparency is working for me

it's just that my wallpaper changes randomly every 15 minutes. And sometimes there is a wallpaper with a light and bright background, which makes conky unreadable.
So I was wondering if there were an option to make conky have a semi-transparent background. Or more like a shade, basically a black or grey or whatever color background with lower opacity so that you can still see the wallpaper, but the text is given more contrast.

[Giblet5]

Conky can't do semi-transparent backgrounds without the use of compositing (eg, Compiz).

There are two ways to accomplish "variable transparency, or "opacity"): RGBA (Red, Blue, Green, Alpha) color support, or compositing. Conky doesn't do either one so you have to do that from Compiz, KDE4, Looking Glass, Gnome Shell, or some other compositing window manager.

Here's a discussion about it using Compiz.

[proxess]

Maybe it can be done now with lua scripts?

[VCoolio]

Maybe it can be done now with lua scripts?

Yes it can: look here.
This requires conky 1.7.1 or higher with lua support.

[proxess]

Yes it can: look here.
This requires conky 1.7.1 or higher with lua support.

I knew I'd seen this somewhere.

[hachel]

cool, that works, cheers

[bluepicaso]

cool, that works, cheers

NOt for me... any help please

[narayan.g8]

I had the same problem and found the solution here

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=105994

Requires conky >=1.7, compiled with lua(Cairo support).

Finally glad that I got off my todo list..