[Solved] Inconsistent Terminal Transparency

lostcause · 2016-05-25 19:05:36

Hi,
My aim is to build one of them eye candy Arch Linux installations. I want the installation to be lightweight, so I have installed just Awesome WM and not any full fledged Desktop Environment.

For that, the first thing that I want to do is configure xterm to be transparent.

Following is what I have done according to the Arch Linux help pages.
Installed XCompmgr and transset-df and went about configuring the things in the manner as mentioned below.

Following are my ,bashrc, .Xresources and .xprofile files.

.bashrc

#
# ~/.bashrc
#

# If not running interactively, don't do anything
[[ $- != *i* ]] && return

alias ls='ls --color=auto'
PS1='[\u@\h \W]\$ '

[ -n "$XTERM_VERSION" ] && transset-df -a > /dev/null

.Xresources

XTerm*termName: xterm-256color
XTerm:locale: true
XTerm*metaSendsEscape: true
XTerm*saveLines: 40966
XTerm*foreground: #F0F3F4
XTerm*background: black
XTerm*locale: true
XTerm*metaSendEscape: true
XTerm*saveLInes: 4096
XTerm*VT100.translations: #override <Btn1Up>: select-end(PRIMARY, CLIPBOARD, CUT_BUFFER0)

.xprofile

xcompmgr -c -C -t-5 -l-5 -r4.2 -o.55 &

The problem that I am facing is that whenever I am opening a new terminal using Mod4+Enter, the terminals are not always tranparent. Sometimes they are opaque and even the font color does not change. I don't get to see my configured terminal the first time I type in Mod4+Enter. Then I have to run xrdb .Xresources to manually load my settings and restart Awesome. Only then do I get transparent terminals. Sometimes, I have seen that even my other windows like my browser becomes transparent (well translucent should be the right word I guess). In fact, when I manually source .bashrc my Chrome window sometimes becomes translucent. Also, when I manually source .bashrc it is alternating between opaque and transparent.
Also if I restart Awesome, my wxisting terminals lose their transparency. I guess I can live with that for now. But I want a more consistent behaviour.
The thing is that the behaviour seems quite erratic and I am not sure why this keeps on happening.

Any help for this old man?

There is also another issue that I would perhaps post in another post anyway, but I am posting it here anyhow.
I have installed the GuestAdditions on my VirtualBox. But I somehow am not getting Full Screen by default. I have to run xrandr to set the resoultion manually everytime I login. I am using the latest version of VirtualBox. My Ubuntu VM does not give me this problem. I am mentioning this here because I dont know if my problem with transparency has got anything to do with my GuestAddition. However, I must mention that this transparency issue was there even when I was getting full screen by default for my Arch Linux VM.

Last edited by lostcause (2016-05-31 17:57:07)

lostcause · 2016-05-29 19:34:13

Hi,
There were a few mistakes in my confiuration files that I was able to find out. MOst of them were typos. Hadnt configured xterm's clipboard before this. During my experimentations, I removed Slim, since I saw somewhere that they have stopped developing Slim, I installed a very heavy GDM, but am happy with it. Reinstalling the display manager helped solve the Full Screen problem I believe. I have now switched to using Compton instead of XCompmgr. So far so good except for very choppy video playback. Will try to see if something can be done on this.

OK, so how does anyone close topics here? Not sure if anyone is reading this!

Last edited by lostcause (2016-05-29 19:42:31)

jasonwryan · 2016-05-29 20:40:16

You can mark your thread as [Solved] by editing your first post and prepending it to the title.

lostcause · 2016-05-31 17:56:36

Thanks,

Arch Linux

#1 2016-05-25 19:05:36

[Solved] Inconsistent Terminal Transparency

#2 2016-05-29 19:34:13

Re: [Solved] Inconsistent Terminal Transparency

#3 2016-05-29 20:40:16

Re: [Solved] Inconsistent Terminal Transparency

#4 2016-05-31 17:56:36

Re: [Solved] Inconsistent Terminal Transparency

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