Transparency Issues

[TheNewbie]

As you can see on the picture linked above (beware 56K! not really, it's only a 313K png), the transparency on the terminal and wbar are not working properly. I have installed the correct drivers for my graphics card, and other various aspects of Xorg and my WM are fine. I have right-clicked to reset wbar, as well as restarting Xorg (pkill and then startx), but neither work. (have tried multiple times, after reboots as well) Finally, after I went on Firefox for a while then restarted Xorg (with Firefox open), the wbar was fixed, as was the terminal transparency. I have no idea why Firefox being open might've helped, but it was the only case where this was fixed. (btw, I was already using base norestore when this occurred, as well as on the multiple reboots afterwards) So, what's causing this problem, and how can I fix it without manually opening something graphical and restarting Xorg everytime I boot up Tiny Core?

[curaga]

Which graphics drivers? Looks like a bug in those.

edit: Could also be something with the WM or wallpaper. Which WM, and how do you set the wallpaper?

[tinypoodle]

You talk about booting base norestore, but it may help to isolate issues by using either default X server or default wm, adding extensions step by step, not to obfuscate matters.

[marquitico]

I certainly have no expertise to compare to your other two replies but just for what it's worth:

I notice on looking closely at the image that it's a bit ambiguous regarding transparency: there is no actual transparency represented, but rather what's known as "pseudotransparency", and only as the background for your terminal (aterm?). As the terminal overlaps your browser, the browser cannot be seen, which is what would happen with true transparency. Instead, your terminal misdraws its pseudotransparent background, which is supposed to be the desktop itself. And on the desktop, your wbar is equally misrendered. So it looks like wbar misdraws the mini screen grab that it uses underneath itself, and then this bad grab is passed in turn to the terminal.

A friend of mine with wbar on her desktop on another distro (Ubuntu, I think) had a problem that looked just like yours. Her workaround was to prevent wbar from starting when X starts, and then manually activating it from a terminal window. Something about having wbar load too soon before Xorg is completely launched was screwing it up.

You wrote:

...have right-clicked to reset wbar...

Strangely enough, on some systems you have to kill wbar, wait, and then restart it to get it to show changes or fix problems. I don't know why right-clicking isn't enough. You actually have to kill it dead. Which is basically what happens when you kill Xorg, right? But if startx restarts very quickly and calls wbar at the wrong moment, all you have done is reiterate the error, so it draws badly all over again.

So in the interest of eliminating possibilities, if you haven't already done so, you may try killing wbar instead of just right-clicking. If this hypothesis is right, Firefox may inadvertently help the issue by using up memory. By "went on Firefox for a while" I assume you meant surfing. Having a large app like the browser open would eat RAM, which would change the dynamic of starting the graphical desktop (i.e. slow everything down a little).

Just a thought.

[tinypoodle]

Automatic start of wbar could be prevented by boot parameter 'noicons'

[jur]

Wasn't icewm reported previously here with this bug? Are you using icewm?

[TheNewbie]

Code: [Select]

TCZDIR="/mnt/$1/tce/optional"
tce-load -i $TCZDIR/firefox.tcz
tce-load -i $TCZDIR/nvidia-glx.tcz
tce-load -i $TCZDIR/fluxbox.tcz
tce-load -i $TCZDIR/filesystems-2.6.33.3-tinycore.tcz
tce-load -i $TCZDIR/compiletc.tcz
sudo pkill Xvesa
startx
exit
I run this at boot. (using nohup [command] &, to let it keep running after killing Xvesa) It's now working, and the change I made was only to remove the loading of flash10.tcz (which was right after firefox.tcz) -- as for WM, it's fluxbox, as on the list of tcz's. Any ideas? (I'm going to try shifting around the order of extensions and playing with "startx &" so I can load an extension after starting X ; it never reaches "exit")

[gerald_clark]

Why don't you just add these to the onboot.lst ?

[curaga]

Why do you run Xvesa if you installed Xorg & the nvidia drivers?

[TheNewbie]

Why do you run Xvesa if you installed Xorg & the nvidia drivers?

"startx" applies to either Xorg or Xvesa, doesn't it? The "stats" command's process list shows Xorg running after killing Xvesa and running "startx".

Why don't you just add these to the onboot.lst ?

I'm using base norestore bootcodes right now.