Re: Colors and keyboard (next)

[Paschoud Alain <mailinglist@webalain.ch>]

>On Thu, May 03, 2001 at 10:21:39PM -0700, Paschoud Alain wrote:
>> hello,
>>
>> I've two question. The first one concern a color problem which is not only
>> cosmetic, but is really annoying. For example, when I launch "linuxconf" in
>> X, a lot of error message appears in the shell, telling me that the color
>> has not been allocated and that it will be replaced by black. Of course, the
>> result is that I have only a black window at the end... Difficult to make
>> configurations when I don't see anything. Does someone has an idea from
>> where could come the problem ?
>
> You're most likely running 8bit colour.  Run at a higher colour depth, or
>don't use up so many colours before openning an xterm.  (colour allocation
>in X works something like this, on a pseudocolor display (or other display
>that uses a palette):  each of the 256 colours are indices into a table of
>24bit RGB colour values.  When an app wants a colour, they ask the server
>for the RGB colour they want, and if there is room in the colour table, the
>server adds the new colour to the colour table and tells the app what index
>value to use.  If there isn't, then it can use a colour that is close to the
>desired one, or it can give up.  BTW, the table lookups for drawing on the
>screen and stuff are all part of the video hardware, so the 8 bit colour
>values get written straight to video RAM.  That's why colour cycling works
>so well on 8bit colour displays: you just mess with the palette, you don't
have to redraw the whole screen.

Ok, now I'm able to understand the problem. But for solving it, I wanted to use Xconfigurator (as explained in my Linux book). But there is no such application in the bin directories of my Linux. What can I use for configuring my video card ?

Thank you in advance.

Alain paschoud