ati mobility x1300 and mrxvt lack of transparency
 

Hello all.

For some reason ever since I've upgraded to the latest X11 mrxvt no longer works with transparency. Direct rendering is enabled according to glxinfo. Below is my mrxvtrc file.

I'm using "radeon" as my graphics driver in xorg.conf.

Any ideas are greatly appreciated!
Thanks.

Unless I'm greatly mistaken, mrxvt doesn't do true transparency, only pseudotransparency, which is completely independent of your video card and drivers.

Are you sure you didn't also upgrade mrxvt? Perhaps the version you have installed now has a bug? If you start mrxvt from another terminal, does it give an error?

Adam

Yes pseudo-transparency is what it does. It was the most recent X server upgrade that seemed to kill it for me. If this is a function of X and not the video drivers then something is wrong with my X.

As for the version of mrxvt I'm using, its the latest in the gentoo repo. I'm not aware of any issues with it.

Is there anything that I could check that could be disabling this functionality? Does X need to be built a certain way perhaps?

Thanks.

As far as I know, there are no special requirements for X when it comes to pseudotransparency in most/all applications. Does rxvt work with pseudo-transparency ( 'rxvt -ip' to test)?

Adam

Actually I just finished trying to get transparency working with xchat because I recall it having this as a feature. When I clicked the checkbox in the preferences to enable this feature, I got an error.
This is of course nonsense because I use evilwm on this machine as well as my other gentoo machine and it works just fine. The only difference is this machine has an ATI mobility radeon x1300.

Any ideas?

Well something other than your driver is causing transparency to fail. Why not try another window manager to see what happens?

You might want to try a different background setter, since fake transparency involves copying a portion of your background to another buffer. feh or esetroot should work ok. Just an idea, in case you didn't try that yet.

Besides that, the only thing I can suggest is to take a look at the X logs, usually at /var/log/Xorg.n.log being "n" a number of a given display. Maybe there's something there (like an X extension that fails to load or some kind of warning that can lead us into the right track).

If some program is failing to load this feature it might be interesting to run it from command line as well to see if it spits out some extra info.

Thanks so much. I emerged FEH and set the background using that and now it works perfectly.

Now to figure out how to auto start this with evilwm