From: Charles Wilson <cwilson@ece.gatech.edu>
Reply-To: cygwin-xfree@cygwin.com
To: cygwin-xfree@cygwin.com
Subject: Re: 8 bit PseudoColor problem
Date: Sun, 08 Dec 2002 04:28:39 -0500
Harold L Hunt II wrote:
I wouldn't say that PseudoColor support is sketchy. I mean, it works fine
either in fullscreen or if you are running Windows in 8 bit color mode.
Granted, PseudoColor is not available when you are running in windowed
mode
with Windows set at higher than 8 bit color.
Correct.
Are you telling me that Cadence still does not work with Cygwin/XFree86
even
when you are using one of the two options outlined above? That would be
disappointing because I did put a lot of time into the PseudoColor support
and I was pretty certain that it was working properly. Hmm...
Well, it's also the fact that *cadence* uses PsuedoColor poorly. It wants
a private colormap, which means lots of fun colorflashing, unless you have
support for multiple 256color psuedocolor maps within the same display.
AFAIK, only Solaris's Xserver actually implements this.
Now, Cadence is ALSO ugly when hosted by XWin32. *But*, because Xwin32
supports multiple windows, the ugliness only affects cadence, and not any
other windows you might have open. In my case, if I'm using an Xserver in
"full screen" mode, then I tend to open up xterms and other windows inside
it -- which means they all get affected by the 8bit colorflashing.
OTOH, if I'm Xhosting an app using an Xserver that supports multiple
windows, then I open up cygwin rxvt (native) rxvt windows, and native
windows editors, etc. And only cadence is affected by the 8bit issue -- so
it's tolerable.
As I said, it has been a long time since I've tried it using the
cygwin-xfree server, but that's my recollection.
--Chuck
If you don't like the color flashing, perhaps you could mitigate it by
running 2 instances of XWin on 2 different screen numbers? If you shift the
Windows desktop into 8-bit color mode and run both instances of XWin in
rootless mode, you'd hardly know that you were running 2 different servers
(except you'll have to take care to get the DISPLAY variable set just
right).