Keith Packard and 32-bit Enlightenment

December 6, 2003

Keith Packard explains how to make Enlightenment work with 32-bit visuals. (linked from the Enlightenment development mailing list):

Well, that's to be expected -- enlightenment happens to find the depth 32 visual and get excited about it. Unfortunately, that depth 32 visual has alpha bits in the upper 8 bits that enlightenment doesn't understand. Leaving those zero makes for some pretty transparent windows, hence you see the background.

xcompmgr did have a bug where enlightenment set the _XSETROOT_ID property to 0 which caused it to kinda lose when drawing the background. That was easy enough to fix though.

I have a hacked up xlib which discards depth 32 visuals; using that makes enlightenment work reasonably well. Of course, the right fix is to make it understand those visuals and "do the right thing". It shouldn't take very much work to make Eterm really be translucent, and to fix the thumbnail window. Sample code for another thumbnail viewer can be found in /cvs/xapps/uncover. That crashes the server when E is running right now though. Time to go debug some more :-)

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