Make terminal window directly transparent to Ubuntu wallpaper

Question

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!

Solution

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.

Source:

• make gnome-terminal real transparent

Comments

[user68186]

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.

[David Foerster]

@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).