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Hehe. That's easy. Just go into configuration and there should be transparency among the plugins. Enable that and you can even have a slider in the message window to allow you to set transparency on the fly.
I don't believe the linux version of Gaim supports transparency.
The Windows version of Gaim supports transparency because windows are capable of being transparent in Windows. The API entry in the Windows Interface allows for such transparency.
The Linux version of Gaim doesn't support transparency because X11 cannot handle transparency properly yet. Real transparency is starting to emerge in Xorg 6.8.2 but it is very buggy and not considered stable enough for a final release. Wait until transparency becomes stable in Xorg - then software developers will start taking advantage of this new capability.
Linux does support "fake transparency", as I like to call it, which is practically taking a slice of the background wallpaper and darkening/lightening the shade of it so it appears to be that the window is transparent. However, no-one has written a plugin to enable that kind of capability in the Linux version.
There are hundreds of plugins for GAIM there. I haven't had time to look at every one but if you can find one that supports colorisation than go ahead and install it (and if you do, please tell us here!)
Just had a look at Adium, it looks brilliant -- if only it looks as nice as that (and if only it was available on Linux -- it's only available for Mac OS X)
Mercury is an MSN client, which is extremely customizable with skins, and contains (nearly) all the latest features of MSN7, but the only down side is that, as it is written in Java, it is extremely slow and sometimes hangs for a short while even on my P4 3.06GHz 512MB RAM.
Originally posted by naimslim89 Just had a look at Adium, it looks brilliant -- if only it looks as nice as that (and if only it was available on Linux -- it's only available for Mac OS X)
it does look awesome, very customizable, supports transparency, you can turn the dropshadow off for the buddy list, and basically it just looks a whole lot better then gaim but functions pretty equivalent, I'm using it right now
linux doesn't look as nice as osx, but at least it looks nicer then windows
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