Transparent windows with Linux

Question

I am trying to find a cross linux distribution solution to the problem of making a program have transparent windows.

I now there is some methods out there, that take screen shots of the windows underneath and then print them as the background of the image. I would prefer not to uses that method because it likely that i would have video running in the background of the program. But if any one knows of a good way to make this happen i would still be please to here about it.

I have tried to implement a method I found at : Changing X11 Windows Properties

I couldn't get any change to happen, though I am not sure if Compiz was working correctly. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You can take a look at the code of the X terminal emulators, KTerm for KDE or Gnome Terminal for gnome (depending of your target platform). I think these are the best examples of apps that implement transparency. I think that you can even find in that code solutions for getting transparency when compiz is not available.