How to remove the thick black background from my Cairo dock in PcLos 2017
 

hi all... I have installed Cairo Dock and I can't get it to be translucent on the desktop. The web pages won't go all the way to the bottom of the screen due to the Cairo Dock area (which seems to stretch across the entire screen) I have been thru the Cairo settings, but can't change it.

thanks in advance for any help... :)

I just logged into root and the Cairo panel works faultlessly?? Logged back into user mode and the dock is still broken.

ok today I am running Cairo Dock on my linuxLite 3.2 and I am really impressed as to how great 'Cairo' operates, and a heap of fun... kudos to these people. I have an issue with the thick visual disturbance bands that seem to be the area 'Cairo' has chosen to resign for its render. It is like a stationary dim border across the screen. Can anyone help with this.... ta

Hi clifftec.

Could you possibly take a screenshot of the issue you describe above and post it here? Cheers.

Regarding the differences that you noticed between running Cairo as root and user in post #1, perhaps that is due to the different configurations kept in ~/.config/cairo-dock (corresponding to either the user or root). It could be that when you launched Cairo as root you had a fresh configuration, and the problem thus lies with the user's configuration. To test this out, you could rename the user's ~/.config/cairo-dock directory and then launch Cairo again (hopefully Cairo deals well with this and creates a fresh configuration directory).

I have the right forum this time...

I see what you mean about the black lines. I've never seen that happening before, but we'll concentrate on that first.

The solution is no doubt located somewhere in Cairo's advanced configuration settings (Appearance section).

What I would suggest first is that you save your theme and then load the Default-Panel theme and see if you're still experiencing the problem. That should tell us if it a configuration issue or not.

thanks hydrurga... ok, here is what I noticed, and the problem does lay with the configuration...

The lines are coming from the 'Appearance/views' settings in Cairo, When I change the 'views' so does the border of each view I select.eg when I select say, 3Dplane, the lines are across the screen as seen in the screenshot, and when I select 'parabolic' the border changes to a faint square as in this attachment. I will see if there is a further 'transparency' setting somewhere to alter this, haven't found it so far.

Have a look at the External Frame settings in Appearance->Advanced Mode->Docks->Background.

it could be that there's a separate compositor running.
please see your linuxlite setup, if there's e.g. compton in autostart somewhere, or if your window manager is configured to use compositing.
disable compositing.
if that fixes the issue, we can search for ways to re-enable compositing, but exclude cairo dock.

... I have defaulted the settings in the composite manager in Cairo 'desktop' settings thus



and have ended with a fixed screen.... thankyou again

Nice one, and Bravo to ondoho for the solution! :)

Ondoho, if you are able to explain why compositing caused the problem then I would be grateful. Many thanks.

i've seen those exact "invisible window rectangles with a shadow" with various conkys + compositor.

the app in question creates a rectangular borderless window, and uses the root window background for that, to create the impression of something non-rectangular being painted "on the desktop".
but the compositor doesn't know about this, thinks it's a normal window, and creates a shadow around it.
shadows being one of the things most compositors do by default.
but it should/must be possible to exclude windows for being "shadowed", most probably in the compositors setup.

Great to know. Thanks!

yes thanks ondoho for that info, and the further composite behavior explanation. It's great to read the cause of the issue, as well as the remedy... very nice, and thanks as well hydrurga... :)