I've been using the stable version of fluxbox for about 3 weeks now (replacing KDE) and have found it to be an excellent WM. I wanted some of the extra features (transparency especially) found on the newer development versions, so I downloaded and installed version 0.9.6pre1. As soon as I logged in I applied a theme and set the menu transparency. Everything looked great and worked fine. But this theme had no wallpaper, so I tried to apply one and this is where I hit my first problem.

I typed: fbsetbg -f /path/to/image.jpg

And a box popped up saying: Something went wrong while setting the wallpaper. Run 'Esetroot -scale /path/to/image.jpg' from an xterm to find out what.

Clicking "OK" did this for me and the I got back the output: Esetroot: Unable to load the image file "/path/to/image.jpg"

That really doesn't give me much to go by so I quit and went into gnome for a while. When I came back and logged into flux again I was met with my second problem.

Now it seems that Transparency is no longer possible, it just wont work in anything (menus, Eterm etc.) and further, that backgrounds cant be used either. I just have that grey criss-cross thing.

I don't know if these problems are connected but I suspect they are. Can somebody please give me some help here? I would very much appreciate it.

Firstly it sounds like your images are either in a different place or had permission settings which mean they cant be used.

Secondly, try fbsetbg -h and fbsetbg -d in a console.

If there's a problem with the screen background then it's likely this is stopping Flux fade it's images into it. I think your first problem is causing the problem with transparencies.
Grey criss-cross thing ???

I'm certain that I have the correct path, and I am the owner of all the files so I don't think thats the problem. But just to be sure I'm not doing something incredibly stupid, what should I type if I want to set an image called "pic.jpg" which is in my home directory as my wallpaper?

I tried -h and -d before. Neither provided anything useful and in fact -d just gave a message saying that fbsetbg was a good program and I wont have any problems... Yeah, great thanks.

Anyway thanks for the help so far, but I'm still stuck.