www.shermania.net

The setup:
We have Ubuntu linux running with accelerated desktop effects (compiz fusion, I believe).
We have Eagle circuit layout editor: http://www.cadsoft.de/ Version 4.16r2
This program is cross-platform and plays great with linux.

The Problem:
When Eagle launches, everything that should be painted black (like, gee, I don't know, TEXT) is transparent. This makes the menus completely unreadable. If you want to read the text or see the lines on the page, you need to place the window over a dark background. This isn't a workable setup.

The problem is the compiz x-effects. Eagle version 4 and lower doesn't like them, and I don't want to upgrade to version 5 yet and break all my custom libraries.

The Solution:
There are two ways to make this work. One way is to upgrade to Eagle 5. That could cause a lot of headaches if you work with other people and need version compatibility. (for now anyway.) There is a quick and easy solution.

Make a shell script, which I called eagle-fix
#!/bin/bash
export XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1
eagle

Give the script execute permissions and move it to /usr/bin (right next to the eagle binary), and you have your workaround. By exporting the SKIP_ARGB tag as shown, it forces compiz to not try it's tricks anymore. This export is done inside it's own shell (invoked when you run the script), so it doesn't affect any commands run outside this script file.

Now you can call eagle-fix from the command line, but sometimes using that pretty Gnome menu is helpful, too. Eagle installs itself under the Applications >> Programming menu, so let's right-click on Applications to fix it. Select 'Edit Menus.' Find the Eagle entry, and right-click to open it's properties window. Change the command to "eagle-fix" and it will run the workaround.

Tada! Eagle is useful again.