Re: Compositing widgets in GTK2?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Brett Granger <bdgranger@alum.mit.edu> writes: 
> What I would really like to do is be able to set the X root window
> background to anything I like, and then run apps that are largely
> transparent or translucent on top of this common background.  It
> appears that neither X nor GTK lend themselves to transparent windows
> (e.g. GdkColor has no alpha component).  Does anybody know if there is
> a framework or X extension for doing this sort of thing?  I read
> somewhere that the render extension really wasn't meant for this and
> that Keith Packard's translucent menus screen shot was not really
> functional...
> 

You're doomed, pretty much. 

If this is for some sort of kiosk/one-off application rather than a
desktop app you could try a framebuffer backend like directfb etc.

Havoc