aterm and true transparency
 

Hi,

I was wondering if there is a way to get aterm to have transparency with respect to all windows on the workspace rather than just the root background? I can emulate such effect with Gnome-terminal so I believe it's related to X server (Xcompsite extension or something) but I don't know how to utilize this with aterm.

Thank you

i did this by creating a file in my home directory called .Xdefaults and add this:

aterm*cursorColor:blue
aterm*colorMode:true
aterm*pointerColor:yellow
aterm*pointerColor2:yellow
aterm*borderWidth:0
aterm*tinting:#ffffff
aterm*loginShell:true
aterm*transparent:true
aterm*shading:50
aterm*background:white
aterm*foreground:light blue
aterm*scrollBar:false
aterm*fade: 60
!aterm*font: 9x15
aterm*font: 8x13
aterm*saveLines:4500
aterm*geometry:85x30
aterm*truetintingType:True
!
! colors
!
aterm*color0:rgb:00/00/00
aterm*color1:rgb:cc/66/66
aterm*color2:rgb:66/cc/66
aterm*color3:rgb:cc/cc/66
aterm*color4:rgb:66/66/cc
aterm*color5:rgb:cc/66/cc
aterm*color6:rgb:66/cc/cc
aterm*color7:rgb:cc/cc/cc
aterm*color8:rgb:63/33/33
aterm*color9:rgb:ff/99/99
aterm*color10:rgb:99/ff/99
aterm*color11:rgb:ff/ff/99
aterm*color12:rgb:99/99/ff
aterm*color13:rgb:ff/99/ff

Thanks detpenguin but that did not make my aterm terminal transparent with respect to other windows on the workspace. The Gnome-terminal has such capability but I just do not know how to enable this with aterm!

You need to enable composite in your xorg.conf by adding
You need as well these 2 programs: xcompmgr and transset

With xcompmgr you enable true transparency and with transset you set the transparency percentage

Keep in mind you NEED to have Composite enabled in your X config file.

Hammett,

I had the Extensions section in my Xorg but running xcompmgr and transset totally brought my X into the grounding halt. Weird thing, only the 2D driver application acted up with delay and glxgears still managed to output the same FPS as before. *sigh*.

Hum....which video card do you have? If it's not 3D accelerated, you'll have A LOT of delay and CPU usage.
If it's 3D accelerated, get the latest drivers (if you haven't done it already).
Also keep in mind that real transparency is very unstable and it's still beta. I can run it without halting the X server, but the background is completely messed up.

I have ATI Radeon 7500 and the it does have hardware 3D accelerated drivers (kernel modules+DRI/DRM/Xorg support). As a matter of fact I managed to up the FPS from 800 fps to 1600 fps by tweeking some options in my Xorg/DRI config file; I even recently upgraded from Xorg 6.8.1 to 6.8.2 (the latest stable version which has radeon drivers and modules included in the package). Anyway, the transparency works just fine in Gnome-terminal w/o slowing down the X. It only occures when I run Xcommgr and transset regardless of whether it's with aterm or any other terminal.

Anyway, all I was trying to see was whether it is possible to have such feature with aterm which apparently with current programs rather forget about it.

Maybe you should use official ATi drivers instead of DRI ones....Perhaps you'll get better results.

There are no official ATI driver for Radeon 7500 that's why I'm using DRI's packaged in Xorg X server which by the way works just great considering I'm getting 1600 FPS with this card. However, I do not see a connection between transparency and hardware 3D accelerated capabilities! Shouldn't this be a 2D driver problem?

The Composite extension puts a lot of strain on your video card. The DRI drivers aren't as good as the official ones so it can't handle it as well. I have an nvidia card and with the official drivers I don't even notice a slow-down. But you won't be able to get the effect you want with aterm, even using composite. I'm suprised somebody hasn't patched aterm or rxvt to use composite for transparency by now, I would but a) am very novice in C and b) have tried playing with X and events and didn't have much luck so this would be much too difficult.

Incidentally, how did you do that with gnome-terminal? I don't use it but I might if I could get an effect like that...