I've seen a lot of screen shots on various places on the web in which people have transparent kickers. I downloaded Super Karamba and some themes for the kicker, but I really can't figure them out at all. Any one have suggestions on how I can make my kicker transparent? I would love to hear them...

Thanks.

It should be quite simple. Start superkaramba (i assume you already had karamba and installed superkaramba without problems, if not, what happened?) this should pop up an open dialog. Find the .theme file of the theme you want and open it. (i assume you've untarred/extracted the themes ) this should be all there is to it. Where exactly are you getting problems?
I'm not trying to treat you like an idiot, just trying to work with what you've said and trying to cover eventualities.

(super)karamba is the best way to have a transparent kicker i should think (though i don't use kde myself).

thanks for the reply. and don't worry about treating me like an idiot--in the linux world i am an idiot, so it's fine.

as for superkaramba, you're right that opening themes is quite simple. i've had no problem doing that. the problem is that the themes are all quite basic in their downloaded form, and i'm guessing that they are relying on the user to make modifications themselves. however, i'm not advanced enough to modify the code itself, and none of the kicker-related themes that i found enable configuration through the configure theme option (or something like that--i'm not using linux at the moment, so i can't double check the exact name). it's my understanding that the configuration option is theme-specific, so not all themes have it.

anyway, thanks a lot for your help. it's greatly appreciated.'

Well, you're pretty far in that case . Where are you getting your themes from? I've seen a lot of transparent kicker replacements at kde-look.org. As far as configuring, you're right, you will need to edit the theme file directly, but if you find a theme you like it should just be a matter of changing where its looking for icons and where these icons point.

as far as themes, yeah, i have some that seem pretty cool that i've gotten from kde-look.org. i just don't know how to customize them so that i add icons to them, increase their length, place them in different spots on the screen, etc.

if that's too complicated to explain here, don't worry about it--i can also take the time to look into it myself.

thanks a lot.

well the only thing i can say to that is, just look at the format of the code when you click to edit the theme...

for instance say you see something liek this for an clickable icon on a theme for the gnome terminal.
IMAGE X=100 Y=12 PATH="pics/48x48/konsole.png"
CLICKAREA X=100 y=12 W=48 H=48 SENSOR=PROGRAM ONCLICK="gnome-terminal"

now lets say you want that to be something else...well its just as easy as:
removing the line --> pics/48x48/konsole.png
and putting the icon you want, and:
removing the line ---> gnome-terminal
and putting the name of the program you want to run when you click there...
and then just to show one more example for we can cover the positioning, i will post one more...so say you have this for opening nautilius to browse your home folder...
IMAGE X=150 y=12 PATH="pics/48x48/home.png"
CLICKAREA X=150 y=12 W=48 H=48 SENSOR=PROGRAM ONCLICK="nautilus"

notice what is different....the PATH is different because i want to use another icon, the ONCLICK is different is because i want to run a different program, and finally ONLY the x axis has changed....
this changed by an increment of 50 to place the nautilus icon to the immediate right of the gnome terminal and its on the same y axis because we want it on the same level as the other icon for it will look clean and neat and for the icons wont' look junky and all over the place...

as for size, you will notice
W = integer
Y = integer
these values are the width and height
also for updateing you will notice
INTERVEL = integer
this integer is a number for how often you want the program to update...so just for you can do the math 1000 = 1 second..

if theres anything else you can post it and i or someone else will try to explain, since this isnt the easiest question to answer cause there is numerous things that can be edited in superkaramba themes and with a broad question of how to customize themes being asked, makes it even harder to answer...so this will give you a start....just be more specific next time, even if you want to give a snippet of code to ask what you have and what you want.