Transparency in menu (Page 1 of 3)

Hello Bren

I am not sure if this will help, but I do not believe you can achieve transparency within Openbox's desktop menu without hacking xcompmgr. Having said that, you also mentioned having icons within the menu, which leads me to think that the screenshot was taken by someone using Xfce (I know there are a few Xfce users on these forums), where it is possible to have transparent menus with icons.

Sorry I could not be more help.

Oops, that would have been me I must remember that when posting screenshots in the future

It is possible to use xfdesktop in openbox to control the desktop which would give you the ability to have a transparent xfce menu. The downside to this of course is you lose the groovy crunchbang menu

@ omns : I think that "xfdesktop" can't give you a transparent menu. xfdesktop manage wallpaper and menu .. but transparent is manage by xfwm4 , no ?

@ blackbinary : if you use xfdesktop for xfce menu , you can always call openbox menu with keybind ( and  with xdotools )

Openbox supports the possibility of transparent menus and it can be implemented using the xcompmgr-dana package that I think is in the crunchbang repos with this command:

xcompmgr -I1 -O1 -Ff -m.95

However I believe if you use shadows with this xcompmgr it will mess with your conky (you can probably fix this by setting conky to the type of dock or something?) I think it will also work using cairo-compmgr (at the cost of half your cpu), it is all bit of a faff on if you don't know what you are doing for pointless see through menu though.

Anyway it probably was XFCE after all.

Screenshot to confirm point as not being lies :)

cairo composite manager  can do it , too .. but last update ( march 2009 ) and no jaunty package

You can install the Xfce environment with the following terminal command:

sudo apt-get install xfce4 xfce4-goodies

Once the above completes, logout of your current session and when the GDM login screen appears, select the Xfce option from the sessions menu. Hope this helps.

sudo apt-get remove xfce4 xfce4-goodies

^^ should do the trick

Hmm, you may have to adjust the default session using the GDM set-up tool. From within Openbox's main menu, see: System -> Login Set-up (GDM). Once it is loaded, you should be able to find an option to either disable auto login or change the default session.

^ I'd seriously suggest having a look at david's solution above. The xcompmgr-dana package works a treat and is in the crunchbang repos. Once installed just add something like this to your autostart.sh and the effect is the same as using xfce. The last two numbers are varied depending on what level of transparency you desire.

xcompmgr -I1 -O1 -Ff -m.86 &

Still working on my desktop. Will post a screenshot when completed

Edit: Here 'tis - http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/post/26983/#p26983

thanks for your advice here david and omns, it looks great!

Thanks for getting back to me, I just tried that and it went through up dating and stuff and then I get an error message, I followed your instructions to the letter

^It should be there. I've just removed the package, cleared the at-get cache and reinstalled. Perhaps the mirror was down when you tried to install. Try again.