could someone please tell me how to make my windows transparent in KDE 3.2

Do you mean every window you open or some programs such as terminals that you have seen screenshots with transparent terminals??

well, apps like Gaim and Terminals and other things like that, i noticed my cisco prof. had transparent windows for Gaim and kwrite, i just never got around to asking him about it

I only know that for a transparent terminal you have to use eterm and start it with options such as --scrollbar=no and things like that, not every program supports transparents windows

how do you like gentoo?

If your distribution uses X.org (look for a file called /etc/x.org) then you can try the 'composite' extension, but beware that it is in the experimental stage and is likely to make your system unusable since it is picky about hardware. If i remember rightly nvidia cards are ok-ish with it.

no, my distribution does not (mandrake 10.1)

sorry, just realised i gave the wrong path, its actually /etc/X11/x.org
According to http://www.mandriva.com/products/101/discovery/packages (Mandrakes new name is Mandriva) it uses X.org so you should be able to try it.

I just love gentoo, it was kida hard at the beggining but once is running it's very nice

okay, its there, could you explain to me what i need to do now please?

Here is a good little article from the Gentoo forums. It is not, however, specific to Gentoo...
You will need to D/L some additonal tools for what you want to do.

http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Xorg_X11_and_Tranparency

I think KDE 3.4 is suppose to include "true" transparancy as opposed to "fake" like most of us are using now, but I think it is more an X issue then KDE so even if you updated to KDE 3.4 you may still have to get the latest X Windows Version "X11R6.8.2" from http://www.x.org/

May be interesting to play around with but have to read up a little more before installing and changing a bunch of configuration files.

Good Luck and please post updates if you get it going.

KC

okay, thank you guys, ill be sure to post updates

is the real transparency only available for kde?

any updates?

I just installed Mandriva. I tried that composite extension but I can't boot into X with it. What's wrong?

There is a guide to the composite extension written jriddell at the KDE website: http://www.kde.me.uk/index.php?page=...omposite-howto

No, real transparency is not KDE only, I had it running on GNOME. However when I was testing it on my machine, KDE was the only one to provide a means of enabling it from the graphical interface.

P31: The command 'dmesg' can give hints as to whats wrong also the XServer logs in /var/log (look for XFree86.log or X.org.log, it might be either depending on how Mandriva has X.org set up)

I cant really help much more than that since its a very long time since I tried it and it was so slow I just removed it again.