Stayka's Desktop Schemes

(Wallpapers with Matching Menu Styles)

This page was last modified: 2008/10/20

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X11 Fluxbox

BTW, my machine Cosna currently operates under Gentoo Linux 2006.1 with kernel 2.6.18-r6, xorg-x11 7.1 and fluxbox 0.9.15.1-r1.

The following three screenshots show my window manager Fluxbox. The left pic is my Fluxbox with hidden toolbar (quite some fun to see Windoze users sit in front of my machine asking in puzzlement "How can you work with this system?"). The middle shot shows it with visible toolbar, and the right shot shows an assortment of the menu options (black style with transparency).


Hidden Toolbar	Visible Toolbar	Some Opened Menus

X11 Fluxbox with xcompmgr and transset

When I stumbled over an entry in the Gentoo Linux Wiki that dealt with Xorg X11 and Transparency, I just had to try it out and it looked pretty cool (not as cool as the Linux XGL Demo, of course, but nonetheless...):

Unfortunately there is one drawback with the X11 composite extension - it severely destabilizes Mozilla Firefox in combination with Flash websites, so if you like to use Firefox, it is advisable to disable Composite in /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "Extensions"
    Option "Composite" "Disable"
EndSection

Normal Styles with ATerm (Fluxbox)

On the other hand, one does not need the X11 composite extension to have nice standard transparency effects. One only needs to set transparency for the toolbar, menus and window bars in the Fluxbox configuration and use ATerm for one's terminal. Then your desktop could look like the ones shown below.

This sets the ATerm to a nice transparent shade:

aterm -name aterm -title 'aterm' -sl 3000 -tr +sb -si -sk -fade 70 -sh 60 
-fn -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-*-120-*-*-c-*-iso8859-2 -fg white

To adjust the toolbar, menus etc, just set their alpha to 160 for a nice effect.

Here you can download the fluxbox colour schemes I used for the screen shots.