rhythmbox desktop visualization

[ImNeat]

Rhythmbox's visualization plugin has an option to apply the visualization to desktop. This worked dandy when I was running fluxbox, but now that I have xfce4 nothing happens - no crash/error/visualization - nothing. Any ideas as to why it's not working?

What are the technical differences between flux and xfce? I'm not sure where to start troubleshooting since I'm not receiving any errors. It's as though rhythmbox thinks the visualization is working fine when in fact it's not.

Thanks in advance for guidance.

[i92guboj]

What are the technical differences between flux and xfce?

The same differences that there are between a wheel and a car.

XFCE is a full blown desktop environment, which includes a tool/task bar, a desktop, a window manager, a file manager, menus, etc. etc. etc.

Fluxbox is just a window manager.

My guess is that the problem might be xfdesktop (which is the one who manager the desktop (the surface below the rest of elements, where the wallpaper and the icons reside). Fluxbox doesn't manage your root window (that's how it's called). But XFCE does (using xfdesktop).

One thing you can try is to launch the plugin, and then use this to kill xfdesktop:

killall -s9 xfdesktop

Be sure you don't have anything important running. That might crash your desktop, or maybe xfce will reload it if you kill it. If it doesn't crash and it's not reloaded, look if you can see the visualization plugin.

If xfdesktop is the problem then I don't know what your actual options would be. If you modify the xfce script not to load it, you will lose functionalities, including the desktop icons and many more things probably (i don't even know if xfce can even operate properly without xfdesktop, though I know for sure that kde do wonderfully without kdesktop).

I don't know if there would be a less aggressive solution. I would ask on the rhythmbox mailing lists for a start. Maybe they can give you a better advise.