True transparent eye candy on Fluxbox

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May 6th, 2007 mysurface Posted in X11, fluxbox, xcompmgr | Hits: 24995 |

I often hear people asking how to install compiz, beryl on Fluxbox at IRC during the period when 3D desktop effects caught the crowd’s attention. And the answer is definitely NO! you can’t mix beryl with Fluxbox.

Why?

Beryl is a combined window manager and composite manager written in C using OpenGL to provide acceleration. Fluxbox is also a window manager, so you can not use beryl and fluxbox together.
by fbot in #fluxbox

If you are looking to have eye candy of true transparency and fade effects on Fluxbox, here I present you a composite manager call xcompmgr. Refers to Transparency Howto at Fluxbox wiki, you need to install transset-df as well to turn a window into transparent. With Fluxbox 1.0rc3 ( or maybe earlier version), Fluxbox have build in true transparent support as well as pseudo transparency.

You are allow to set the opacity ( as they wrote as alpha value ) on root menu, focus and unfocus window. There is a Force Pseudo-Transparency option under rootmenu-> configuration-> transparency, you need to uncheck it if you are running xcompmgr, so that the true transparent effects will be enable. You can ask Fluxbox to remember transparency settings on a particular application window by right click on the window bar. Uncheck Use Defaults under Transparency option, and check Transparency under Remember option.

The installation on xcompmgr will not be covered on this post, please refer to Fluxbox wiki for the X11 settings.

How to enable true transparency?