Full transparent panel with Lucid’s Ambiance and Radiance themes
As much as I love the new look of Lucid, I’m compelled to tweak the look and feel to suit my own taste. After haunting /wg/ at 4chan, someone requested purple-hued wallpapers. I downloaded all of them and came across the one below. If someone knows, I’d love to give them the credit they deserve for it.
I’ve since eliminated the bottom panel and replaced it with Docky. In the top panel I replaced the Menu Bar applet with the Main Menu applet, removed some icons and added the CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor applet. I then went about setting the top panel to transparent to let the wallpaper behind it bleed through but the Ambiance and Radiance themes weren’t being cooperative. Only the panel would accept transparency but none of the icons. Below is what I ended up with:
That just wasn’t going to work. First thing I did was copy the Ambiance theme to my ~/.themes/ directory. This magically replaces the system’s default global settings for Ambiance with my own and lets me make edits without destroying the originals.
cp -R /usr/share/themes/Ambiance ~/.themes/
I opened Ambiance’s gtkrc file with gedit.
gedit ~/.themes/Ambiance/gtk-2.0/gtkrc
I scrolled down to the panel’s style section and looked for:
bg_pixmap[NORMAL] = "panel_bg.png"
I just commented out that line by placing a # at the beginning of it.
# bg_pixmap[NORMAL] = "panel_bg.png"
After saving the gtkrc file, the change wasn’t immediate. I opened the System > Preferences > Appearance settings, switched the theme to something else and then back to Ambiance. All of the icons and applets lost their backgrounds and the change was complete.
You can do the same with Radiance by copying the original files from
/usr/share/themes/Radiance
and commenting out its bg_pixmap setting.
For me, I like the darker gray windows of Ambiance along with my desktop’s new look.
April 18th, 2010 at 3:36 am
Thanks for the transparency trick – easy to follow and best of all, it works!
April 22nd, 2010 at 6:10 pm
awesome, thanks!
April 24th, 2010 at 10:40 pm
Thanks for the tip!
April 30th, 2010 at 4:45 pm
That is a very simple fix. Thank you very much.
May 2nd, 2010 at 4:29 pm
Applied this to my panels. I used to change the look of the background but that is nowhere near as good as making it transparent like this.
May 3rd, 2010 at 6:52 pm
thanks! that worked right away, ciao!
May 5th, 2010 at 5:46 am
Interesting that the panel_bg.png is not white and that this doesn’t work for me.
May 5th, 2010 at 5:48 am
On reading this again I guess I got lost in my problem which is that some icons have a white background. Mine is a different issue altogether than this post is about
May 17th, 2010 at 2:27 pm
Hey,still my panel is looking ugly.Still there is some ugly black color behind the network manager applet and clock applet. what to do?
May 19th, 2010 at 8:12 pm
@raamee Sounds like you may need to switch to a different theme for a couple of seconds, then switch back to Ambiance/Radiance. Or, log out and then log back in. The applets have a tendency to retain the background image.
June 23rd, 2010 at 5:50 am
Thanks a lot it looks cool now
July 20th, 2010 at 6:40 pm
[...] no Ubuntu Publicado em 20/07/2010 por Carlos Emerson Junior Achei essa dica no Rebel Zero e passo para os fãs do Ubuntu que querem colocar a barra superior totalmente transparente, usando [...]
September 5th, 2010 at 11:51 pm
It worked.Thanks a lot.
September 8th, 2010 at 5:55 pm
Thanks a lot for this tip ! what about creating a bug report about this ?
September 25th, 2010 at 9:30 pm
Thanks! It has changed slightly for Maverick but it gave me a place to start… for those of you using Maverick copy as above, then edit the file ~/.themes/Radiance/gtk-2.0/apps/gnome-panel.rc and comment out the same line as above.
December 4th, 2010 at 8:34 am
Thanks + thanks to Mike for Maverick version !
December 12th, 2010 at 2:36 pm
[...] (as in 100% transparent, including the indicator applets). The source of the tip is to be found here. Ok so there we [...]
January 13th, 2011 at 3:49 pm
Hi, I know my question is too old for this post, but I hope you can help, I would like to know where did you get the fancy task manager from? I have in KDE and working fine, but in GNome it’s not available.
January 14th, 2011 at 2:21 am
@Bassam
Docky, and it is available through Ubuntu’s repositories or the Ubuntu Software Center.
January 31st, 2011 at 2:25 am
Hey, I exactly did this; bu now my time-date thingy looks awful. I guess it’s caused by the font. Any ideas?
P.S. It looks like this:
[ screenshot removed ]
February 1st, 2011 at 12:49 am
@Cem
The link to your screenshot was removed due to it displaying your email address.
From the looks of your window icons, I’m assuming you’re using Maverick, or even Natty, so the steps outlined in this post wouldn’t work exactly. As Ubuntu evolves, some of the configuration files get moved around. You can see Mike’s comment from September 25, 2010 where he explains what he did for Maverick..
If this isn’t the case, you may just need to reload the theme. You can do this by selecting a different theme, wait for it to load, then switch back to your now edited Ambiance/Radiance theme.
I really haven’t encountered a font issue like that when employing this workaround. If what I just outlined still didn’t fix it, try setting the fonts to something else at least temporarily to see if it changes. You may even have to log out then back in again.
February 9th, 2011 at 12:31 am
Hello,
I tried all the steps until to open the gtkrc file with gedit. But then I can find that command bg_pixmap[NORMAL] = “panel_bg.png”. I tried on my own, I used the search function but I couldn’t find it. I am using the latest Ubuntu version (10.10). Any ideas?
February 9th, 2011 at 12:33 am
Sorry I meant I can’t find that command bg_pixmap[NORMAL] = “panel_bg.png”.