I have seen a few screenshot's on the internet with a terminal window directly on the desktop wallpaper, and some of them had and IRC chat going on. I would like to know how to pull this off in GNOME if possible. Also, I am using Fedora Core 3 (for now) if it matters any.

AFAIK the only way to do this in current Gnome is to use Eterm. Aterm may be a possibilty also.

I'm not sure if Fedora Core comes with Eterm so here's a link, http://www.eterm.org/ .
It should however come with aterm. Try running aterm --help to see the options available.

From what I have just looked at, aterm can use the -tr option, but that will only use the wallpaper in the background as the terminal background. And, if you move the terminal over another window, it is obviously non-transparent.

Plus, FC3 doesn't use true xorg transparancy out of the box (I think you need to go to the stuff under development - CVS?).

But I was able to get a clear box with opaque text using aterm. I was able to remove window decorations, which just left me with a non-transparent scroll bar on the right. I move that off-screen, and it looks like it is doing what you think it is (even though it is not).

on most of those screenshots it isn't true transparency just what markjensen said, it uses the root picture. Aterm, eterm and even rxvt can be made to do this in various window managers. additionally it is possible to get rid of the scrollbar in aterm.

You can normally run terminals with an option to disable window decorations (titlebar, resizing boxes, etc) - read the man pages for that. Note that when no window decorations are used, you should still be able to move/resize windows whilst holding down the alt key, but that depends on which window manager you're using (Metacity, KWin, Openbox, etc...).

For KDE using aterm (change colours and desktop number to suite yor needs).

If you want to do it in KDE <3.3 u can do it by right-clicking on the window decoration
of the app you want: - advanced - special Window Settings and configure there.
To use use IRC in a terminal you install IRSSI

Dunno if it is possible to do this in GNOME, GNOME lacks some options that in KDE are just there to use...

I have this line in my .xinitrc so I get a real-time monitor of the syslog's output in a transparent, borderless term on the desktop.

Eterm -x -g 80x35+512+384 --buttonbar=0 --trans --shade=1 --font edges --scrollbar=no --no-cursor -e tail -f /var/log/syslog &

All these options are detailed in the man page.

machine$ man eterm

Just read.

If you wanted a more "regular" terminal window you might run something like:

Eterm -x -g 80x25+0+0 --buttonbar=0 --trans --shade=50 --scrollbar=no &

I run Blackbox as my window manager. In the Blackbox window manager you can move a borderless window by pressing and holding alt+mouse1, or use bbkeys to set up keyboard shortcuts (I use ctrl+shift+arrowkeys).

Have fun.

-E