Various troubles, firstly icewmbg

OK, so.... I'm really reaching the end of my tether with icewm. I have
loved this wm for years now... I particularly love the Blueheart theme
that I use with it.

But I use it together with KDE3.5, because that's how I get it to do
what I want, specifically make my Konsole window transparent, and also
put my own bg image up, in place of the one used by the theme. Other
than that I have little or no use for KDE.

I have tried numerous times over several years to figure out how to get
off of KDE3 and run icewm standalone, along with xcompmgr and transset
for doing the transparent thing, but..... after trying again today and
being frustrated in EXACTLY the same way for the Nth time.... well... I
don't know each time why I expect to be able to figure something out
that I didn't before. Nothing changes - I'm just as smart (or not) as I
ever was :=\

One of my biggest perennial frustrations has been with icewmbg. This
program, quite simply, DOES NOT DO anything. In particular it does not
do what it is advertised to do. I have followed all the instructions for
configuration. icewmbg DOES NOT WORK. How does anyone tolerate this
situation?? If there is some kind of "magic" to make it work, how does
anyone tolerate that this magic is not documented?

I have been interested in switching to a wm called "awesome" (whose name
I hate), but it has a steep learning curve and it has just been easier
to stay where I'm at. But I think I'm stretching my ability to depend on
the long-dead KDE3 too far by now, and I really need a simpler and more
sustainable work environment.

If anyone cares enough to try to give me some help, I may stay with
icewm longer. The first thing, I think, is to get my bg image loaded. It
is a JPEG and is properly configured in ALL of the different files:
preferences, prefoverride, etc, with full (absolute) file path. No luck.

Dave

p.s. There is one thing that I very decidedly DO NOT love about icewm...
     something that is very clearly a bug, and a major one. However I
     suspect it only appears when running under KDE3, since apparently
     no one else but me is bothered by it in all these years. I have
     mentioned it on this list before, but rather than do so again, I
     feel I really need to get standalone icewm working first, so I can
     test my hypothesis properly.  If I can get a standalone desktop
     running, and the bug is still there, I'm afraid I will dump icewm
     for awesome. But it will have been mostly a very pleasant 10 years
     or more using it....

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