I'm running fvwm on my laptop and I just finished installing cairo-clock. When I run cairo-clock, it runs as expected, but has a black box around it which is supposed to actually be transparent. I found this on the FAQ at http://macslow.thepimp.net/?page_id=23#mark_3:

Q: The clock compiles/installs, but when I run it there is such a terrible black square behind it?
A: Be sure to fire up your compositing-manager and the black square will magically vanish.

I've looked around to find out if I can fire up a compositing-manager with my setup and haven't found much out about it. Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compositing_window_manager
it explains that xfvwm is a combination of a window manager and a compositing manager.

Is xfvwm like fvwm? How could I get a compositing manager running without installing a new window manager as well? Any other suggestions? Thanks.

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EDIT

Okay maybe I'm blind. In the first link that I posted there's a reference right at the beginning to compositing-manager xcompmgr. I'll see where that takes things.

xfwm is part of xfce, i think you have a mis-spelling...

Okay yeah, it does say xfwm. That would explain why my investigations into xfvwm were all dead ends. It's probably arisen from some form of orthographical compositing managers in my brain.

fvwm is a complely different window manager, so you probably got that from someone elses typo or something like that...

http://www.fvwm.org/