Howto create a Transparent Terminal in Ubuntu Desktop
Posted by admin on January 8th, 2008 
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With AllTray you can dock any application with no native tray icon (like Evolution, Thunderbird, Terminals) into the system tray. A high-light feature is that a click on the “close” button will minimize back to system tray. It works well with Gnome, KDE, XFCE 4*, Fluxbox* and WindowMaker*. (*) No drag ‘n drop support. Enable with “-nm” option.
Install alltray in ubuntu
sudo aptitude install alltray
This will complete the installation
Configuring Transparent Terminal
First you need to open Gnome Terminal from applications—>Accessories—>Terminal
Once it opens go to Edit—>Profiles
Once it opens you should see similar to the following screen here you need to Press the New button
Once it opens you should see similar to the following screen here you need to give the new profile a name and click on create
The profile editor dialog should open.
Here, uncheck ‘Show menubar by default in new terminals’.
Go to Effects tab, select ‘Transparent background’ and set the transparency amount close to None.
Go to Scrolling tab and select Disabled from the drop-down list.
Close the editing profile dialog and in the Profiles dialog, select the newly created profile from the ‘Profile used when launching a new terminal’ drop-down list of your choice and close it.
Create a new launcher on the Desktop (right click on the background)
Now you need to enter a name for it,insert the following command in the ‘Command’ field,comment field and click on ok
alltray -x -st -g +380+5 “gnome-terminal --window-with-profile=tterm --geometry=110x30"
Launcher created on desktop as follows
Make sure that one of your Gnome panels has the ‘Notification Area’ applet.Open the launcher created on the desktop and click on the terminal icon in the notification area. You should now have a transparent terminal in your background.
One more Transparent Terminal screenshot
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February 18th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
It’s a Windows mentality to install software to do a job that can be done without it.
See my transparent terminal, using no ancillary software but only the preferences in the terminal itself. It’s the xfce4-terminal on the xfce4 desktop but the same can be done in Gnome with it’s terminal.
http://www.debiantutorials.org/transparent-terminal-debian.png
February 18th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
Riiiiiight… that was ‘useful’…
February 18th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
This is somewhat useless because if you have any text behind the terminal it becomes impossible to read. A great work around is the blur plugin for compiz.
April 3rd, 2008 at 9:19 pm
If you open up the GNOME terminal in ubuntu, click on ‘Edit’ and then ‘Current Profile’, go to ‘Effects’ tab and click on ‘Transparent Background’, you will have exactly the same thing - with one major difference. The transparent background will be your desktop wallpaper only. If your terminal is on top of any other app (such as Firefox), that will not show through. Thus, your terminal text isn’t competing for your eyes.
Also, you can change the font color at the same time, so if your background is very dark, you don’t strain yourself trying to read black. You can read white or any other contrasting color you like.
May 28th, 2008 at 10:13 pm
How about this : a slide down (also transparent) terminal/console like you would find in many first person shooter games for your Gnome desktop
http://tech-bytes.co.uk/2008/05/23/a-quake-style-console-for-your-gnome-desktop/