As you probably know, RGBA transparency was planned to be released with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx but it eventually didn't made it because of some issues such as various applications crashing and so on. RGBA transparency has been confirmed to be included in Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat by Mark Shuttleworth at UDS-M but if you can't wait, you can try it using an Ubuntu PPA.


So why use RGBA transparency and not the transparency that comes with Compiz? Well, because RGBA doesn't make everything transparent the way Compiz does, but some elements such as the font and controls/buttons is still perfectly visible.


You could install RGBA support from a PPA since Ubuntu Karmic, but back then there were a lot of issues with it. I've tested the latest RGBA from the PPA and I didn't notice any crashes whatsoever (notes: with the default package from the PPA - no further tweaks; tested on an Nvidia graphics card, I cannot say how it will work on other graphics cards) with Totem, Firefox and so on, applications which used to crash when RGBA was enabled (but RGBA doesn't work for them). This means the RGBA support is now more stable or the source has been packaged better, but before adding the PPA, remember that there might still be bugs so use it at your own risk! I will include complete removal instructions just in case.

This is the first post that I'm written thanks to the new Google Buzz. Well, more thanks to am monkeyd who told us about the recent changes (and also thanks to him we got everything up and running), but anyway.

Now back to the post. Nautilus Elementary got some really nice changes today. The most important one is the integration of Gloobus Flow. Other changes include RGBA enabling/disabling, icons for the zoom slider (which can also be enabled/disabled) and a new hotkey for toggling the menubar: F8.

The code hasn't been released in the PPA yet, so to install it, follow the steps below: