Hi,

Is there anywhere where I can download wmswallow or similar app. I want to put a terminal emulator on/in the root window that is see-through, has no scrollbars, menus, borders or titlebar and can not be moved form its inital position. From what I've readwmswallow seemed perfect but the author is no longer maintaining it and I can't find a download for it. Oh, and it doesn't matter if the transparancy is fake, ie just painted the portion of the background in the terminal's window

I've tried doing as some suggested from previous threads with esetroot and launching rxvt with different options but can't seem to get the effect I'm after. If someone could give details or point me towards a tutorial that would be great.

thanks

Phil

PS, I'm using blackbox

try root-tail it is still alive. there is another that gentoo people like a lot but I forget the name.. something like xrootconsole or something... does the same thing. Looks cool but I found it not be very usefull because my windows are always covering it.

Cheers for the links, but I'm after a usable console in my root window that I can run commands and do my work on, not just a non-interactive window showing log messages

aterm

I have achieved that by customising my console window. I removed all scrollbars, frames, menus, select a transparent console (mc), select keep below others, select no border then right click the console and save settings. Works a treat :-)

I've got somewhere with eterm and got it more or less right. I used the -P option to set the background but as the position takes percentages to position it I can't get it quite right. Is there anyway I can specify the position of the background picture using pixels not percentages. The transparency doesn't seem to want to work, complaining that it can't find to root window.

I use a transparent, un-bordered, un-decorated aterm for this. Works great.

With either aterm or eterm you have to use a compliant program to set your backround for transparency to work. estroot or wmsetbg or something.

Also aterm is a lot faster than eterm. I've tested it by doing "time ls -la /usr/lib". Aterm finished in less than half the time it takes eterm. Also eterm uses up twice as much mem than aterm.

aterm is really good and it supports transparencies too. And on my slow machine it is blazingly fast. I have replaced xterm with aterm and I am really satisfied.

Which version of aterm would you recommend, I tried version 0.4.1 and 1.00 beta2 and both failed to compile, can't remember what error was produced with the beta version but with 0.4.1 version it complained that there where too many '#endif's at the end of ximage_utils.c line 830, there where two at the end of that file, line 829 so I commented one out and the compile worked and aterm seems to be working okay, so now onto the configuration.

Why are you compiling it? If you're using slackware, just grab the package for it

ah.



Well to be fair I've only started using linux on my desktop recently, I have however been using it on my server for quite a while where I always compile software so that I can configure compile time options exactly to my needs, so it has become almost second nature to got for the source and compile. Must bookmark that site you linked me too methinks. Cheers

How do you turn off the borders for aterm, apprantley the window manager looks after this? I'm using blackbox as my WM. I've tried using bblaunch but doesn't seem to want to work very well

Well, in FVWM, it's:

Style "bterm" NoTitle, HandleWidth 0

(bterm is an aterm started with the switch "-name bterm" added, so I can have normal aterms & borderless aterms, depending on what I want them for)

If you run the new aterm beta you can do it with an argument.