I was experimenting how much is possible to shrink a complete graphical system, free from Debian repositories, remindful of TinyME 2008 which is a complete graphical newbie proof GNU/Linux with an iso 147MB smaller than antiX 19 core which has no X at all.

But thinking to nowadays newbies which like eye candies I needed something fancy also if old school so I thought to transparency.

Btw. I avoided the use of gtk3 using the latest gtk2 counterparts (i.e. galculator, xarchiver, gsimplecal) caught in the net.

There was no doubt on which compositor to use, xcompmgr due to the lowest memory requirements but I encountered the first issue.

Background disappears starting xcompmgr substituted by default JWM solid color.

Someone on the net wrote that compton would solve the issue.
Nope, the issue was done by using anypaper (less resource hungry than nitrogen but always newbies friendly) as command to set background in .jwmrc file and the same issue was present also using compton, they need real images not command.

I discovered that anypaper stores the background image to use in user home directory under .anypaper/ as output.png so substituing the line

<Background type="command">anypaper -l</Background>

with

<Background type="image">/home/(username)/.anypaper/output.png</Background>

solved the issue unfortunately leaving an hiccup, to see the new background when changed is needed to restart JWM.

The second trouble was the shadow under conky own window, this time the guys on the net were right, compton solves the issue but compton is not a wizard if it solved the issue it should be possible to have the same result also with the less resources hungry xcompmgr.

Problem solved adding the line

own_window_argb_visual yes

at the default antiX .conkyrc which I copy on every distro I try cause its layout is the best as amount of informations supplied without lose readability.

Readability, this was the third issue, having its own window transparency was applied also to conky making it less readable.

This time too issue solved with some lines in a config files .jwmrc

<Group>
<Name>conky</Name>
<Option>opacity:1.0</Option>
</Group>

It has been enough to have it readable again as xcompmgr wasn't running.

Hope this help and maybe could be also useful to others.

Btw. The same system installed as normal install on a 16GB usb key running on a x86_64 processor like atom N455 has an higher memory footprint as in the screenshot done on a 32bit Atom Z520 don't ask me why.

See you.

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