Enable Transparent Gnome Panels/Menus/Windows in Ubuntu 10.10

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Do you want to customize your Ubuntu desktop with the transparent panels, menus, and windows? As we know, Compiz can do the job, but what if you don’t need a complete transparency and want the font and controls/buttons is still perfectly visible?

This tutorial is about how to enable RGBA transparency in Gnome desktop, and this might be what you want.

Preparation :

To get RGBA transparency enabled in your Ubuntu, first you need to install and enable graphics driver properly.
And in right-click desktop menu “Change Desktop Background” option Visual Effects tab, make sure Normal or Extra was enabled.

Installation:

Open up a teminal from Appications -> Accessoires menu and add the PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:erik-b-andersen/rgba-gtk
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Now, install gnome-color-chooser and you can use it to enable RGBA:

sudo apt-get install gnome-color-chooser gtk2-module-rgba

Launch gnome-color-chooser at System > Preferences > Gnome Color Chooser. Go to Engines tab, tick “Global” and select “Murrine” in the drop-down box.

Now, click Preferences button to go to its configuration window and check the two check-boxes after “Configuration of Enable/Disable RGBA support”

Finally, logout and back in.

Note:

1. You can also install murrine themes with below command, and use it in right-click desktop -> Change Desktop Background -> Theme tab -> click Customize button.

sudo apt-get install murrine-themes

2. Due to bugs, the panel is only partially transparent and only GTK+ applications support RGBA transparency.

Screenshot:

12 users responded in " Enable Transparent Gnome Panels/Menus/Windows in Ubuntu 10.10 "

William said, in February 5th, 2011 at 11:59 am

Running this with Ubuntu 10.10 it incurred a major instability issue. Although the transparency did work, it would not allow wallpapers to be visible and when trying to open desktop configuration to change the background image, the entire desktop freezes forcing a hard shutdown of the pc in order to reboot (not good for the hard drive). I had to reinstall Ubuntu 10.10 in order to fix the mess this caused to the file structure of my pc. Ill wait until a more stable transparent system is available. Thanks..

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larry said, in February 15th, 2011 at 4:07 pm

This did also ‘kill’ wallpapers for me on ubuntu 10.10 (32bit), moreover the system started to ‘start file manager’s, tons of them on its own. when O disabled the transparency this problem vanished, but still no wallpapers.

the transparency wasn’t that great either (e.g. the colors of menus would change if they were longer than 10 lines or so)

any tips on how to get wallpapers working again?

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larry Reply:
February 15th, 2011 at 4:18 pm

just checked for updates (update manager) and it downloaded an update for nautilus (from the same ppa that was used for enabling rgba) and now my wallpapers are back up… dunno if this is a final fix, but seems to work for now

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kyle said, in February 16th, 2011 at 9:51 pm

Ditto for me. This tutorial caused a mess and I reformatted Ubu to fix it. I should have read the readers comments above first. This completely froze my system on reboot and I could not access anything. A nightmare. The poster should revisit this one and paste a huge warning at top or just pull this one down. AWEFUL!!! I was working from a relatively fresh Ubuntu install. I don’t think it was the system. Something is bad wrong with this process.

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Julian Luna said, in March 6th, 2011 at 8:45 pm

FUCK now it does open half of the main menu’s stuff :s

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