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So before I came to Linux I was using Windows and stumbled upon a Kali version, in which when you opened a terminal and you could see through every window (Firefox) directly to your wallpaper.

Q: How can I do the same thing on Ubuntu 14.04.2?

PS. Note that I am a newbie so keep it simple!

  • 2
    Do you want the terminal window to be transparent and see the Firefox underneath it? If so open a terminal and look into its menu. Go Edit > Profile Preference > Background Tab > Transparent background. – user68186 Jul 14 '15 at 14:41
  • I did that , tho i want to see the wallpaper instantly and not the window behind it =p – Πέτρος Ιωσηφίδης Jul 14 '15 at 16:04
  • @Anwar: Not exactly. From what I understand, OP wants the terminal background to show the part of the desktop wallpaper right behind the terminal window (depending on the current size and location of that window). – David Foerster Sep 04 '16 at 15:09

1 Answers1

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I don't think you can force the transparency to display only your wallpaper on a system running Unity.

The reason can be found in one of the gconf settings of gnome-terminal on 14.04:

$ gconftool-2 --long-docs /apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default/background_type

      Type of terminal background. May be "solid" for a solid color,
      "image" for an image, or "transparent" for either real transparency if
      a compositing window manager is running, or pseudo-transparency
      otherwise.

The only way to get a pseudo-transparency (i.e terminal background set to the wallpaper) is by running Ubuntu without a compositing manager.

If your graphics card doesn't support 3d-acceleration, Gnome 3 automatically runs the fallback-mode (which is Kali's default mode). That's why you may have seen gnome-terminal showing only the wallpaper.

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