Transparent Shells go Haywire in SlackWare 12.2

canyouscore · 06-08-2009, 07:11 AM

I prefer to use ETerm or Aterm in transparent mode on a Fluxbox desktop. I also use the Terminus Font.
Since becoming a Slackware user I have had almost no problems. However, I when I use ETerm or Aterm in transparent mode after about 20mins into a session the terminal goes wacky.

Examples: In ETerm I will type "vim foobar.txt" and the terminal will lockup. I will have to kill vim and the terminal die. Or, scrolling will go crazy.

In Aterm scrolling becomes extremely erratic

I have the composite flag enabled in my xorg.conf. However, I think this could still be an Xorg issue. xterm and uxterm function without issue. The KDE app Konsole will not use transparency. Enabling transparency for Konsole will crash all KDE apps. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Hardware: Nvidia 7900--Nvidia Driver
2.13 GHz Intel Processor

Thanks in advance!

onebuck · 06-08-2009, 07:27 AM

Hi,

First, do you have DPMS setup for your system?

Welcome to LQ!

canyouscore · 06-08-2009, 09:09 AM

Hello, and thanks.

No. I just gave xorg.conf the once over and no sign of a DPMS flag anywhere. In my past experience with the nviida driver this must have been done automatically (I don't recall ever setting DMPS up manually). Regardless, It sounds fun, I'll find out how to get it going. Any help would be great thanks!

rigelan · 06-08-2009, 12:50 PM

As a bit of encouragement, I've gotten aterm to work great in transparency in Slackware for a long time and I use fluxbox 100% of the time. I've also recently moved to a different project that seems to be based similar to aterm called rxvt-unicode or urxvt. It does transparencies exactly the same.

Just know that it can be accomplished.

edit:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/aterm
According this page, the maintainer of aterm has moved to working on urxvt instead.