Version: 2.1 (using Devel) Installed from: Compiled sources Compiler: gcc (GCC) 4.1.3 20070929 (prerelease) (Ubuntu 4.1.2-16ubuntu2) OS: Linux I compiled KDE 4 from SVN on Kubuntu 7.10, using kdesvn-build. I'm using the proprietary nVidia driver from the Ubuntu repositories, and had the X header files installed when compiling KDE 4, so compositing with KWin works. It is also possible to make decorations and windows translucent. Nonetheless, when I enable background transparency in Konsole (Settings->Edit Current Profile->Appearence->Edit), I don't see any effect. There is no error message (like the one I get when compositing is disabled), but the setting just seems to get ignored. Is this feature supposed to be working?
Oops, the product should be "konsole", not "kontact", sorry ... could someone please move the bug there?
Did you run Konsole with --enable-transparency?
Hey, this really works :-) However, I find this very very very confusing. In my opinion, a switch like --disable-transparency with transparency enabled by default (if available) would make much more sense. The funny thing is, I do get an error message if compositing isn't available to do the transparency, but I don't get an error message when it's just disabled. It's really as confusing as it gets. Sorry if this sounds like a rant, I'm just stating my opinion! :-) Anyway, keep up the good work!
The '--enable-transparency' switch will likely eventually go away. It's currently there as a precaution, to make the use of an ARGB visual for the application an explicit opt-in, as there are technical issues around them for many users. Even fairly recent versions of the nVidia graphics driver (169.07 and older) have bugs that affect ARGB Qt4 scrollviews and cause rendering corruption. Yakuake, which is another KDE terminal emulator built on the Konsole technology, currently requests an ARGB visual at startup when there's (a) one available and (b) a composition manager is running, and later decides to use its for-transparency rendering codepath based on (a), (b) and (c) a user-configurable preference. I've made the Konsole KPart behave similarly for the purpose of embedding it in Yakuake. But because requesting an ARGB visual at startup isn't gated by an argument like in Konsole, there have already been some nVidia users with problems because of the aforementioned driver bugs. Yakuake can easily afford to be a bit braver here, but Konsole really can not.
*** Bug has been marked as fixed ***.
I understand (well, actually I don't ;-)). Hopefully these issues can be resolved eventually.