[SOLVED] LXDE Pseudo Transparency Issue

Mr. Swillis · 2010-09-25 20:45:44

I've been playing around with Openbox quite a bit lately, and after getting a nice working settup with lxpanel, nitrogen, and xcompmgr, I've found myself being more curious about LXDE. I like having an alternate session that's more "user friendly" for when other people in my house need to use my computer. I can get XFCE to work just fine, but it's a little overkill when I already have many of the LXDE components already installed/runnning in my Openbox session.

One issue I've noticed (which is purely asthetic) is that the pseudo transparency effects from things like lxpanel and lxterminal don't seem to work when I'm logged into the LXDE session. Oddly, they both work fine (even without xcompmgr) in my Openbox session. Using lxpanel as an example, I have the background color set to a grey'ish color (5a5a5b). When I turn the opacity down to 0 (so full transparency), I get a solid black panel instead of a transparent panel. This I find a bit strange, since the color of my panel is NOT black.

One big difference between my Openbox session and my LXDE session is that nitrogen handles the wallpaper in Openbox and PcManFM handles the wallpaper in LXDE. So, for troubleshooting, I tried two things:

1) I tried setting the background "color" to something other than black (thinking that maybe the transparency affect was going through the wallpaper and hitting the solid color behind it). I used a red color, so it would be obvious in testing, but still get a solid black panel.

2) I tried killing the pcmanfm process altogether, which nuked the icons and the wallpaper, but STIILL get a solid black lxpanel when opacity is set to 0.

It's really a trivial issue that doesn't have any bearing on day-to-day use, but it still bothers me since I can't figure it out. Does anyone know of any known issues with pseudo transparency in LXDE, or if maybe there's a weird setting somewhere that needs to be enabled/changed/whatever? Again, this is not just with lxpanel, but with anything that uses pseudo transparency, and it all works fine in my plain Openbox session.

Thanks!

Swill

Last edited by Mr. Swillis (2010-09-26 00:34:56)

vacant · 2010-09-25 21:13:42

In the lxsession startup I commented out pcmanfm and use feh for wallpaper. I don't use desktop icons.

$ cat /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE/autostart 
@lxpanel --profile LXDE
#@pcmanfm --desktop --profile lxde
@xscreensaver -no-splash
@setxkbmap gb
@feh --bg-scale "$(find /mnt/store/multimedia/hires -name *.jpg | shuf -n 1)"

I have a pseudo-transparent panel with openbox

Mr. Swillis · 2010-09-26 00:15:50

Nice, that seems to work for me pretty well. I use nitrogen for the wallpaper, but same idea. So, it looks like there might be an issue with the pcmanfm desktop control and pseudo transparency (at least in my setup).

Swill

Mr. Swillis · 2010-09-26 00:22:09

Looks like this may have already been reported as a bug: https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/20104

This seems to be more about the --desktop option in general, but a few of the comments also mention issues now with transparency.

Swill

Arch Linux

#1 2010-09-25 20:45:44

[SOLVED] LXDE Pseudo Transparency Issue

#2 2010-09-25 21:13:42

Re: [SOLVED] LXDE Pseudo Transparency Issue

#3 2010-09-26 00:15:50

Re: [SOLVED] LXDE Pseudo Transparency Issue

#4 2010-09-26 00:22:09

Re: [SOLVED] LXDE Pseudo Transparency Issue

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