Yet Another wxWidgets Fail

I've been trying off and on for a while to get transparency to work in my Linux/GTK builds, and for whatever reason it's just not working (at all.) After running some experiments last night, the best I can determine is that there simply is no alpha channel available in the wxBitmap/wxMemoryDC that I'm trying to use.

It's not that I didn't try to get one. Supposedly all you need to do is construct bitmaps with a 32 bpp and everything else will take care of itself; however, even simple operations like putting a pixel or drawing onto the DC returns 0xFF for the alpha channel every time. The alpha simply disappears. Because the alpha is gone, when I attempt to draw or blit the bitmaps, I get a full overwrite instead of a proper alpha blend.

Once again, it's beyond me how something so simple can silently fail so catastrophically while giving no indication of error or dysfunction. I'm using the modules according to the published API, and the expected results do not occur.

Naturally, there is coupled to this another issue: wxWidgets does not have very good drawing/shading and blending primitives. I could probably draw what I want using the tools, but it will be costly, both in time and processing power.

The obvious two solutions present themselves:

1) Find another library, such as OpenGL, that can I can integrate into the toolkit, or

2) Write my own graphics subsystem.

Size is, in my mind, at a premium here, so I would prefer not to bloat out the executable with another five megabytes of drawing and 3D utilities. It also just so happens that I've done a lot of game and graphics programming in the past. Graphics programming that included various primitive libraries.

Now, the only issue is how to get direct access to wxBitmap data so that I can do my drawing elsewhere, then copy into the bitmap for blitting. It just so happens that there's an undocumented 'wxRawBitmap' class that looks like it might do the job. Hooray for undocumented features. What the hell.