HOWTO: True or Pseudo-Transparent Borderless Pop-up Terminals

[23meg]

Hi 23meg,

Your guide says that one needs a "recent" nVidia card for true transparency to work. How recent is recent? I have a GeForce MX/MX400.

kozimodo

If your card is recent enough to be supported by the closed source Nvidia driver, you should give it a try. You may not get top performance with an MX400 with shadows etc. , but if you just use the -n option it should cut it.

[kozimodo]

Thanks 23meg,

The installation of the nVidia drivers went fine but it crapped out on me once I installed xcompmgr. Oh well...

kozimodo

[nchase]

Is it possible to drag the terminal window around and retain transparency?

[23meg]

Is it possible to drag the terminal window around and retain transparency?

Yes.

kozimodo: Weren't you able start X at all after activating composite?

[daedalusman]

I'm getting this error when I try the make command from step 4 of the true transparency guide.

make
cc -Wall `pkg-config --cflags xcomposite xfixes xdamage xrender` -c transSet.c
/bin/sh: cc: command not found
make: *** [transSet.o] Error 127

How do I fix this? Thanks

[23meg]

Make sure you have at least one version of gcc installed. Better yet, install the build-essential package.

[daedalusman]

Well, I made it throught he HOWTO but the transparency doesn't work. Here is my script file...

#!/bin/bash
alltray -x -st -g +4+44 "gnome-terminal --window-with-profile=coolterm --geometry=159x58" & sleep 3
transset-df -n "coolterm (AllTray)"  0.10

Also, when I restarted, after adding the "xcompmgr -n" command to startup with order 40, it wouldn't load up Gnome, it just hung on the ubuntu splash logo. Any thoughts on this?

[23meg]

Why do you specify a --geometry option with your gnome-terminal? Alltray will take care of the window location; try removing that line.

Also, when I restarted, after adding the "xcompmgr -n" command to startup with order 40, it wouldn't load up Gnome, it just hung on the ubuntu splash logo. Any thoughts on this?

Did you try 0? If neither work, you'll have to experiment to find a value that works by trial and error.

[daedalusman]

Well I got the transparency to work, I read throught the vista-ish affects howto and that got it going. And I think I'm not going to have it start when the system starts, I got that working too, but since its so buggy and crashes a lot I'm going to set up a script file. That way I can start and stop it easily. Thanks for the help and a great howto, its some really cool stuff and I can't wait for this to get farther along in development. Its going to rock when its more stable.

[23meg]

Happy to know you got it working. The toggle script is really useful for switching off composite when it's not needed.

Also check out the new build of xcompmgr in that thread which will probably help with stability.