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'Transparent' Eterm Window


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Hey Everyone,

 

I've been playing with Mandriva for a while now (and since any of my lasts posts I've completely removed all traces of M$ from my box). Got everything running just as I like it, so now I'm working on aesthetics.

 

Since I have very few icons on my desktop I decided to make it stick Eterm over it, giving me a terminal window on top of the desktop. Using the following I got it to look just right...

Eterm -x -g 180x70+10+10 --buttonbar=0 --trans --shade=1  --scrollbar=no -c white

 

And after some playing around with Window Behaviour I made it do what i want.

 

Now this looks good and i presumed that if i restarted my machine it'd still be there. However upon restarting I do have an eterm window but with none of the associated options (so not transparent, or stuck to desktop). This is fine as I can just close this window and start again, but I would like to automate this process.

 

Firstly, I put the command in a script and stuck it in the KDE autostart folder. This works, but instead of using my desktop image to make itself "transparent" it uses the background image from KDM, which gives me a big, ugly, blue square on the desktop. I inserted a sleep period into the script file to make sure that KDE was completely loaded (and so KMD completely gone?) before executing the command but this was no help. If anyone can help me with this problem it'd be much appreciated.

 

Secondly, since the Eterm window doesn't behave properly when restoring the session is there anyway to automatically close this window on shut down? I'm pretty new/useless with scripts, but i have managed to determine the PID of the window (since it'll be the only Eterm window running) using ...

 

ps -C Eterm -o pid=

 

But I cant seem to use the output of this in the "kill" command, any help with this would also be gratefully accepted.

 

None of this is urgent as it is just me being picky with looks, but there must be people out there with sollutions so I thought I'd better ask just to keep them busy :P

 

Thanks in advance,

 

Owen Mc

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Well I've solved the second problem, seems that I took "killall" too literally, assuming it would kill all processes. turns out it just kills all processes that have the name you specify so "killall Eterm" works fine.

 

First problem still bugging me tho, any ideas?

 

Cheers,

 

Owen Mc

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Thanks for that, got the settings to stick by editting user.cfg :thumbs:

 

But the background thing is still confusing me. If I leave the Eterm window running from the start of the session (where it uses the KDM background rather than desktop background) then after 10 minutes the background changes to the desktop background and so appears transparent. I have timed this, and it is exactly 10 minutes after starting the session, it seems to me that KDM (or some part of it?) is running in the background (behind KDE?) and so Eterm is picking this up as the "desktop", if this is the case then why does KDM close after 10 minutes??

 

As you can probably see, I have no idea what I'm talking about anymore, so I wonder if someone more educated in the ways of linux could explain this one?

 

Thanks again to daniewicz, and thanks in advance to anyone else..

 

Owen Mc

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Ok now i'm even more confused...

 

I logged in using GNOME, which had the default background. changed it to the same backgroudn as KDE, went back to KDE and ran Eterm, and now it uses the right picture. Does this mean that GNOME is running at the same time as KDE? If so then why?, and if not then why does this solve my problems?

 

I guess its good that I got it working, but in doing so I'm further confused. Can anyone explain?

 

Cheers

 

Owen Mc

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