Xfce: Compiz, RGBA Transparency, UI Tweaks/ (Page 1 of 2)

Sounds good to me, I'll test this out sometime soon

First things first. Thanks for making this awesome tutorial.

Now I hope I can contribute a bit.
This is how I got it working. A bit more work than yours but maybe there somewhere is a solution for problems you've mentioned.

I did the same steps as you until setting shadows and adding the eric-b-andersen repo.
I already had added hadret's unstable repo. It has newer murrine engine.
I didn't add erik-b-andersen ppa but I downloaded the file "gtk2-module-rgba" directly from here.
I then installed emerald (since it wasn't in the repos used by Statler, downloaded from http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/emerald).
I had to enable "Move Window" and "Resize Window" in CompizConfig Settings Manager under Window Management.

I start the standard Statler Xfce desktop and only then I enable Compiz (true Compiz Fusion Icon).
I expirience tha same problem with tint2.

All I did, as far as I remember, was to add this line

own_window_argb_visual yes

below line

own_window_hints undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager

and replaced

own_window_type desktop

with

own_window_type normal

in .conkyrc.

I didn't experience any problems with Iceweasel and flash.

I didn't have to do this since there was a file "gtkrgba.sh" in the "/etc/profile.d/" folder, that looks like this:

export GTK_MODULES=rgba
export GTK_RGBA_APPS=allbut:firefox:firefox-3.5:gksudo:ooffice:soffice:inksca\
pe:gksu:gtk-recordMyDesktop:kompozer-bin:gpaint:lernid:totem:truecrypt:thunde\
rbird-bin:thunderbird:checkgmail:gloobus-preview:exe:firefox-bin:swiftfox-bin\
:gnome-mplayer:gnome-screensaver:google-chrome:chromium-browser:prism-bin:gno\
me-mplayer:xsane:metacity:mutter:Banshee

Hope there something helpful.
Regards.

Last edited by semko (2010-08-07 17:18:54)

The big one in this case is enabling Alpha transparency, the modules won't work without Compiz, AFAIK. Additionally, Compiz offers more control over windows, a ton of configuration options and a bunch of plugins...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4wB3GUemVw

@semko,  yw!

Awesome. If you want Conky to be embedded in you desktop remove...

normal |

...from the "Shadow windows" field of the Window Decoration plugin in Compiz and don't argue!

Now we have Compiz effects and transparency. If you want to temporarily disable transparency, say to play a video game or watch a movie, kill Compiz by running...

xfwm4 --replace

...in the Run dialog, and...

compiz --replace

...when you're done.

Let's add a shadow under you notification popups... In /home/USER_NAME open the hidden file .notify-osd. From what I can tell, shadows are determined by bubble-corner-radius and are a none/slight/heavy option. Setting the radius at 33,33% gives a decently matched shadow. We'll come back to this file later.

Now we're getting into personal preferences, but let's continue to mimic the original screenshot...
Let's add a new GTK2 theme and new icons. In a terminal, run...

sudo apt-get install shiki-wise-theme

Now go to Settings>Appearence>Style and choose "Shiki-wise", then go to the Icons tab and choose "GNOME-Wise". Logout/in to load all the new icons. Ah, a little color to our desktop! If you want a wallpaper that matches perfectly, in terminal run...

sudo apt-get install arc-wise

...then go to Settings>Desktop>Background, click, the large "plus" button and navigate to either /images/wallpapers/shared/Arc-wise.png in your home/User_NAME directory or to /usr/share/backgrounds/Arc-wise.png in your file system.

With a new wallpaper that grey box in tint2 is out of place, so let's remove it. In your USER_NAME folder, navigate to (hidden) .configure/tint2/tint2rc, and under "# Taskbar" change the line "taskbar_active_background_id = 4" to "taskbar_active_background_id = 0" and logout/in to see the change.

Back after a short break...

Last edited by hhh (2010-08-08 12:08:49)

Very little that I can see. Xfce's transparency is seemless and low on resources. imo compiz is a bit of an oxymoron in a lightweight desktop. That said this is a nice tutorial for making openbox do jazzy things Thank you for sharing

I guess a similar question to the above is what is the advantage of compiz over cairo-xcompmgr  or xcompmgr-dana that Alpha 2 uses with openbox?

@omns, yes, in spite of #! being set up as a low resource OS, this is all about eyecandy and resources be damned... but for Xfce, not Openbox, as the thread title states. You can't use both Openbox and Compiz, they're both window managers.

@thil77, Compiz has virtual desktops and Expo for managing them. Also, it's a different transparency effect, can't you see? Your active window is opaque and the other windows are uniformly transparent, mine are all partially transparent but the text is still readable (thanks to the Gaussian blur).

Anyway, I'll keep posting tweaks and we'll leave the comparison of window managers and compositing for another thread.

Last edited by hhh (2010-08-07 23:42:18)

@omns, np.

I didn't phrase that right. This is about getting all the eyecandy that the Lucid Gnome environment can give you but using way less RAM and using Xfce programs which start faster than Gnome equivalents, resulting in a much snappier feeling OS. Conky is saying my RAM usage is 135MB at idle, what's a Lucid desktop like?

Let's keep going. Here is the wallpaper from the original screen shot in both regular and wide screen formats, set one as your wallpaper...
http://desktop.qkype.com/wallpapers/nat … _75136.jpg
http://widescreen.qkype.com/wallpapers/ … _19245.jpg

We need to install Emerald as our window decorator. Scroll to the bottom of this page and choose i386 for 32-bit or amd64 and choose a mirror, then save/install the package...
http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/libemeraldengine0
...and the same with this one...
http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/emerald
Click this link too...
http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/p … u1_all.deb
Start emerald from the Run dialog...

emerald --replace

We can change Emerald's appearance and themes from Settings>Emerald Theme Manager. Go to Themes Settings>Edit Themes>Theme>Name: Untitled Theme, switch the name to Beryl Red and save the default theme. Then you can mess around and still come back to the default via the Themes tab.

Make sure Emerald starts at login by adding it in Settings>Session and Startup>Application Autostart with the command

emerald --replace

If you want to switch back to the regular (GTK) decorations, disable Emerald from the startup applications and logout/login.

We need to install another Emerald theme. Click this link...
http://gnome-look.org/CONTENT/content-f … ue.emerald
Save the file, then go to Settings>Emerald Theme Manager>Themes Settings>Themes>Import and navigate to the .emerald package. Then choose it from the Themes tab in the manager . Go to Edit Themes>Frame Engines and set the engine to truglass; now our windows almost look like the original screenshot's. To remove the icon and window title from the Title Bar, go to Edit Themes>Titlebar>Title Bar>Title-bar Object Layout and change it to...

::NXC:Normal Layout

Here's how to get Thunar to recognize the desktop... Go to /home/USER_NAME and create a folder named Desktop. Now go to the hidden file .config/user-dirs.dirs and open it with gedit. Change the line...

XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/"

...to...

XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Desktop"

Logout and back in. Now let's get icons on the desktop and drag and drop capability. Go to Settings>Desktop>Icons>Appearance>Icon Type and change it to File/launcher icons.

*Warning* This changes the menu structure when right-clicking the desktop (it adds commands for creating files, folders and launchers on the desktop). All the menus are still there but they are one level deeper. If you've been starting programs by right-clicking the desktop you will probably hate this, feel free to switch the setting back to None.

In the next post we'll get the panel rocking...

Last edited by hhh (2010-12-08 15:24:51)

@FSM, with my limited machine (32-bit, 1G RAM, 1.8 MHz processor) I feel a big difference between Gnome and Xfce, yet I want my CrunchBang box to look as good as anyone's rig.

Ok, the panel: I love tint2, tint2 is great, let's lose tint2. You can edit CrunchBang's startup script (/home/USER_NAME/.config/xfce4/autostart.sh) to keep tint2 from starting, but I just disabled the autostart script in Settings>Session and Startup>Application Autostart (uncheck xfce4-autostart). Disable the Volume Icon too. Kill tint2 and start the panel from terminal...

killall tint2

xfce4-panel

...and it will open and autohide on the left edge of your screen. Right-click it and Choose "Customize Panel" and set Position>Fixed>Full Width and move it to the bottom of your screen, uncheck Autohide, uncheck "Make active panel opaque" under Appearance and set the slider at 0% Transparency. Close the dialog.

Right click on the different objects on the panel (if there are any) and choose "Remove" till you have an empty panel. Now choose "Add New Items..." and add one Seperator or Spacing and make it an "Expanding empty space".  Ah, the panel matches. You can add the applets you want now (you'll probably want a clock, the Xfce Menu and a Task List), except that the Notification Area and Weather applets won't work with transparency, I don't know why (workaround coming up ahead...) You can change the icon for the Xfce Menu button by right-clicking it and choosing Properties, then choose a new one under Icons>Button icon:.

Let's make sure the panel starts with our next session, so logout and check the box in the logout window to "Save session for future logins".

Ok, to get the Notification Area back up we need to install Gnome Applets. This is a largish download that's going to bring a bunch of dependencies in with it, but we'll be able to remove some of them afterwards. If you don't need a notification area and don't care about a weather applet, you should probably omit these next few steps...

Install the Xf Applet plugin and Gnome Applets from a terminal (if you're picky and want to make sure you've stripped out every Gnome program that's possible, copy the "To be installed" programs to a text file so you can apt-get purge them one by one later. If you log out before removing gnome-session you will log back into a handicapped Gnome session w/out an updated Nautilus, which means you will lose your wallpaper! Switch to an Xfce session in the login manager and set it to "Always use this session")...

sudo apt-get install xfce4-xfapplet-plugin gnome-applets

When it's done, run...

sudo apt-get purge gnome-power-manager gnome-screenshot gnome-search-tool gnome-session gnome-session-bin gnome-session-common gnome-system-monitor gnome-media-common gnome-system-log

Then...

sudo apt-get --purge autoremove && sudo apt-get autoclean

Logout/login to activate the Gnome applets. You'll then find Xf Applet in the Xfce panel applets list and the Gnome Applets list will appear when you add an Xf Applet.

Now we can add a new Gnome applet that I love, Talika. Talika is a window switcher/dock/launcher. It iconifies windows and let's you manage them with the mouse... left click to launch/maximise/minimize, middle click to close and right click for a context menu for moving the window to another workspace, pinning it as a launcher, etc... Here's the page at Gnome Look...
http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php?content=118267
There are instructions in the comments to build it from SVN for some added features. Here are those terminal commands...

sudo apt-get install subversion gnome-common libglib2.0-dev libpanel-applet2-dev libwnck-dev

svn co https://talika.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/talika talika

cd talika/trunk/

./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr

make

sudo make install

Last edited by hhh (2012-02-13 17:46:40)

I'm interested to know if tint2, Ipager or another pager draw multi-desktop ?
try the option taskbar_mode = multi_desktop to see if you get one taskbar by desktop (like in my previous screen).

Compiz is known (some years ago) to made a confusion between 'Virtual desktop' and 'Viewport'.
The 'desktop number' in compiz added 'Viewport' and doesn't manage 'Virtual desktop'.

See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour … bug/153322
or http://forum.compiz.org/viewtopic.php?f=86&t=11943
or  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour … bug/150690

This bug is standing since the beginning of compiz.
But I would be very happy if it's fixed ... and Ipager/tint2 can show multi-desktop in compiz.

Last edited by thil77 (2010-08-08 13:19:29)

@omns, I've been wanting to play with a Lucid install, Ill set aside a small partition. The agonizing thing will be the installation; 20-30 minutes, as I remember, vs. 5 for CrunchBang:^0

I can't say a bad thing about Lucid.

I skipped downloading the language packs during installation and that cut the time to 7 minutes. The thing boots fast, runs solid and looks damn good.  Once everything was set up right, I barely noticed a difference, meaning once I trimmed the fat from Gnome's startup services.

Neither OS ran printer, power management or screensaver services. Gnome also had Bluetooth, Evolution notifications, file updating, remote desktop blah blah blah all shut off so that it would be close to the Xfce setup.

Yes, Xfce was lighter on RAM... if I just booted up and let the desktop idle, Conky reported 206MB being used by Ubuntu and 152 by Crunchbang.  During use, they felt practically identical, except for Nautilus drags a little more the first time you open it than Thunar does.

Gnome...

Xfce...

Anyway, CrunchBang can handle all the eyecandy and run a bit lighter doing it.

If anybody has success or failure with any of the steps outlined, let me know.

Last edited by hhh (2010-08-10 18:12:42)

To remove the shadows around conky in compiz I had to add

& !(name=Conky)

to the Shadow windows dialogue.

I see what you mean now, I think the answer is no. As soon as I turn Compiz off tint2 shows only 1 taskbar and Xfce's number of workspaces gets set to 1. You can then set workspaces in terms of "horizontal size" (and vertical size, if you want). Tint2 then shows all open apps no matter the workspace. If you enable the Desktop Cube and Rotate Cube plugins, clicking an app's icon in tint2 will "spin" you to that workspace (cube is the name only, you can have more than 4 desks). With Expo enabled you "zoom" out to a view of all workspaces where you can drag windows to other workspaces or zoom back in or to another space.

Speaking of Compiz, if you enable the Animations plugin you may discover a bug... Notify Osd flickers when fading out (maybe when fading in too) To fix it, go to the Open Animation and Close Animation tabs in that plugin's settings, there will be 3 entries in each tab. Double-click the bottom entry in both and delete...

Notification |

and save the changes.

Animations can add some cool effects but they can affect how your computer "feels". I love the Zoom effect but if the duration is over 100 I get distracted by it. My settings now are the defaults with these changes: all durations set to 80, the bottom effect in both tabs set to "Zoom", and the 1 entry in the Minimize tab set to "None" (there is a little lag when my box draws an unminimized window compared to minimizing it, and with an animation added it just looks bad).

I've added "UI Tweaks" to this thread's title... in the 6 months that I've been exclusively using Xfce I've found the documention/community around it to be pretty sparse, so any tips anyone can list here in terms of UI tweaks or usability wouldn't hurt any!

One thing that I had to ask help for was switching the display of toolbars between text and icons, which pvsage told me was under Appearance>Settings. That browser font tweak was courtesy of the Arch wiki, but it's not on that wiki's Xfce page but on their font configuration page.

Here's one I haven't found an answer for... Is there a way for Thunar to recognize an audio cd? I can play one and I can rip one but I can't "see" it in Thunar, and if I install PCManFM I can see an icon for it, but if I click it I get a "location is not mountable" error. I've checked out the Xfce versions of sidux, PCLinuxOS,  openSUSE and Xubuntu, and it's the same in all of them. Put an audio CD in a Gnome setup and it happily gives you an icon on the desktop that you can browse. I guess this is an issue in thunar-volman?
http://gezeiten.org/post/2010/01/Thunar … ion-of-HAL

Here's how to delay tint2 from starting up... add it to your Autostart Applications with this command...

bash -c "sleep 10; tint2"

... where 10 is seconds and can be changed, but this gave compiz time to kick in so that tint2 started without shadows drawn if set that way. Of course, any program can be delayed using the same syntax (eg: bash -c "sleep 5; conky").

Last edited by hhh (2010-08-10 20:00:19)