[SOLVED] Konsole transparency not working when launching from menu

[mweishaa]

First off - this was my FIRST mostly uneventful Linux upgrade. Linux has been my OS since the late 90s. I keep trying upgrades, and so far every one has given me immediate headaches. This time, the upgrade was smooth and my system came back to me. I still have some apps to try out, and other things that I'm sure I'll find issues with somewhere (like sound) but overall - a good experience.

But...my konsole transparency doesn't seem to be working. I had it set before the upgrade. I started messing around with some of the desktop effects, but nothing helped.

Then I launched konsole from the command line, and transparency works! But ONLY if I launch it manually. I can modify the colors, transparency, etc. But it only takes effect on manually launched konsoles.

My menu item did have the option "--enable-transparency" on it from previously. I removed that option because it's no longer supported from the command line, and even tried adding "--force-transparency". Nothing works.

Can anyone reproduce this or offer any help?

[dibl]

Re: Konsole transparency not working when launching from menu

It happens that I was just playing with transparency on the Konsole the other day, and it seems to work fine on my 10.10 installation (not an upgrade).

- Can you launch it with Alt-F2 "konsole" with no quote marks?

- Desktop Effects is relevant -- you have to have compositing enabled. So, when you have konsole running, what do you see with

glxgears

??

[mweishaa]

Re: Konsole transparency not working when launching from menu

It happens that I was just playing with transparency on the Konsole the other day, and it seems to work fine on my 10.10 installation (not an upgrade).

- Can you launch it with Alt-F2 "konsole" with no quote marks?

Yes.. no transparency

- Desktop Effects is relevant -- you have to have compositing enabled. So, when you have konsole running, what do you see with

glxgears

??

Desktop effects are enabled, when I was playing with them I was just disabling some things to see if it impacted transparency.
I see glxgears when launched from a konsole started from menu (no transparency) or from command line (transparency)

Here's a screenshot of the windows.. one launched with the menu, the other launched from that konsole's command line....
[img width=400 height=255]http://captaincheeto.com/temp/kontran-small.jpg[/img]

EDIT:
The destop effects I have enabled are:
Sliding popups
Fade
Login
Logout
Dialog Parent
Box Switch
Desktop Cube
Desktop Cube Animation

(and just as a side note, which I may raise as a new issue.... my Kmenu and taskbar are semi-transparent now too... going to see if I can figure out why, but since it's transparency related I thought I'd mention it)

[Snowhog]

Re: Konsole transparency not working when launching from menu

Tell us about your PC, specifically, about your graphics card.

[mweishaa]

Re: Konsole transparency not working when launching from menu

Tell us about your PC, specifically, about your graphics card.

I'm running 64-bit 10.10 on an Intel Core 2 Quad Q8400 w/4 GB RAM
Intel 82G33/G31 Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 10)

dpkg shows:
xserver-xorg-video-intel 2:2.12.0-1ubuntu5 X.Org X server -- Intel i8xx, i9xx display driver

[Snowhog]

Re: Konsole transparency not working when launching from menu

Verify that you have the package mesa-utils installed. This brings in the dri libraries.

[mweishaa]

Re: Konsole transparency not working when launching from menu

Verify that you have the package mesa-utils installed. This brings in the dri libraries.

weishaar@heimlich2:~$ dpkg -l | grep mesa
ii libgl1-mesa-dev 7.9~git20100924-0ubuntu2 A free implementation of the OpenGL API -- GLX development files
ii libgl1-mesa-dri 7.9~git20100924-0ubuntu2 A free implementation of the OpenGL API -- DRI modules
ii libgl1-mesa-glx 7.9~git20100924-0ubuntu2 A free implementation of the OpenGL API -- GLX runtime
ii libglu1-mesa 7.9~git20100924-0ubuntu2 The OpenGL utility library (GLU)
ii libglu1-mesa-dev 7.9~git20100924-0ubuntu2 The OpenGL utility library -- development files
ii mesa-common-dev 7.9~git20100924-0ubuntu2 Developer documentation for Mesa
ii mesa-utils 8.0.1-0ubuntu1 Miscellaneous Mesa GL utilities

[dibl]

Re: Konsole transparency not working when launching from menu

I confess to being mystified by the failure of konsole transparency to work correctly on that system. I strongly suspect some bug in the compositing function, because I know from experience that compositing must be working correctly as a prerequisite to transparency, but I don't see anything of concern in your setup, and I don't know where to point to look for the bug. You can review the ~/.xsession-errors file, but I doubt you'll see anything useful there. Like you've already done, I would do experiments with Desktop Effects, especially with the compositing features (like turning them off one at a time), and see if you can observe change in the behavior of the konsole's transparency function. Sorry, that's the best I've got on this one.

[mweishaa]

Re: Konsole transparency not working when launching from menu

I confess to being mystified by the failure of konsole transparency to work correctly on that system. I strongly suspect some bug in the compositing function, because I know from experience that compositing must be working correctly as a prerequisite to transparency, but I don't see anything of concern in your setup, and I don't know where to point to look for the bug. You can review the ~/.xsession-errors file, but I doubt you'll see anything useful there. Like you've already done, I would do experiments with Desktop Effects, especially with the compositing features (like turning them off one at a time), and see if you can observe change in the behavior of the konsole's transparency function. Sorry, that's the best I've got on this one.

If it were not working at all, I would be less confused myself... but to have it work only when launching from the command line has me perplexed. The only thing I can think of is that the command line is getting a different profile or rc file than when it is launched from the menu. I'll keep poking around.

[dibl]

Re: Konsole transparency not working when launching from menu

That's a good point. Maybe take a look at launchpad for bugs with dbus-launch, or something like that.

[mweishaa]

Re: Konsole transparency not working when launching from menu

I'm onto something.... I did some testing on the state of the window (size) when launching from console or menu, and what is retained when closing it.

In short, changes made to the window size to the menu-launched konsole are reflected in the console-launched konsole... but not vice-versa.


launch open state action close state reason
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
con 63x23 none 63x23 confirm con size
menu 123x23 none 123x23 confirm menu size
con 123x23 none 123x23 verify con size (now menu size)
menu 123x23 resize 183x23 verify menu size, change menu size
con 183x23 resize 63x23 verify new con size, change con size
con 63x23 none 63x23 confirm con size
menu 183x23 none 183x23 verify menu size not con size

[mweishaa]

[ Solved ] Re: Konsole transparency not working when launching from menu

Wow.. ok.. this problem is gone.
I closed the konsole that came up after my upgrade reboot... and the problem is gone.
Transparency works now if I launch it from the menu.

I still have no idea why that happened, because I was launching new konsoles while testing this.
That original konsole must have had something locked that prevented any new konsole launched from reading the changes (except when launched from command line)

How odd.