kxdocker has huge ugly black background

[googlymoogly]

hi all. i just recently installed kxdocker and configuring it seems to be causing me a headache. i finally figured out how to install themes but for some reason when it zooms this huge black box arises from behind it and justs looks hideous. check the screenshot.
http://s145.photobucket.com/albums/r238/strungoutfan78/?action=view&current=snapshot1.png

also /sys/kernel/security (as well as my /usr partition) keeps adding itself everytime i open kxdocker. i don't even know what /sys/kernel/security is. it's an empty folder.

finally, sunbird, when running, is displayed as, 'iconless', Gecko.

the how tos on the kxdocker website suck *ss and don't offer any insight to these problems and i can't seem to be able to find any threads either here or on the ubuntu forms (where i get most of my answers, even for sabayon).

any advice is greatly appreciated.

oh and how the hell do i change the kmenu icon? i hate that tux apple. i'd like to keep the default sabayon kmenu animated icon.

[googlymoogly]

ok so apparently i need beryl running and the blackness disappears and i get translucency in the dock background and all that jazz. nowhere have i read that a composite window manager needs to be running in order to use this.

beryl works on my system but is terribly slow. my laptop is not exactly high-end. what are some quick tweaks i can make to it in order to speed things up?

i have an intel integrated i910 vid card and it does support aiglx, which is what i'm using right now.

[edgevision]

I couldn't get kxdocker or ksmoothdock running well with Beryl. Both ran fine under kwin, but kxdocker seems to work a lot better in general. Upon switching to Compiz-Fusion, I found that kxdocker runs really well with it.

[googlymoogly]

You know it's funny you say that. I cannot, for the life of me, get Compiz-Fusion to work correctly on my machine. It does to me the same exact thing that Compiz did to me, which is why I always stuck with Beryl instead. That reason is there are no window decorations. I have since reinstalled Sabayon since my last Compiz-Fusion attempt so I no longer have it emerged, but now after seeing some fantastic demonstrations I would like to try it again. The only problem is it seems some of the packages are masked and I really don't know how to work with installing masked files. It's something that I just have never got around to understanding, being new to portage and all. My only hold up really is that I don't want Compiz-Fusion to break my machine again. I never quite was able to clean up the mess I caused with it, hence the reinstall. Maybe I'm just retarded.

[edgevision]

Do you use IM? I'm sure I'd be able to walk you through this, provided you aren't using obsolete hardware.

[googlymoogly]

yeah i use yahoo, but i don't have an msn account, which i notice you use.

[googlymoogly]

Well, thank you very much for the offer but it seems I was able to get Compiz-Fusion working just fine following this wiki....

http://www.sabayonlinux.org/wiki/index.php?title=HOWTO:_Latest_Compiz-Fusion

It's absolutely gorgeous and I can even run it on higher detail settings than I could with beryl. The only problem that I have with it is I still can't seem to play video or view my webcam using luvcview, neither of which I was ever able to do with beryl either. This baffles me because in all the previews I watched video worked flawlessly. This could be due to my Intel crap graphics though.

Here's a screenshot: http://s145.photobucket.com/albums/r238/strungoutfan78/?action=view&current=compiz-fusion.png

[googlymoogly]

Found the answer to at least solve the video playback issue at the ubuntu forums..... here:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=492411

I'll let you know if i find a fix for the webcam issue.