On Sun, Apr 28, 2002 at 05:35:11PM -0700, Jim Gettys wrote: > The cross hatch was chosen by yours truly I suspect sometime in the > last half of 1984. (at least, I have memories of experimenting with > a number of different patterns... If it wasn't me, it was rws/\.) > > It has a property most patterns don't: you can xor rubber banding > on a one bit deep display (all we had at the time) and see the > result. Yes, and this was quite valuable with twm, but these days all moves and resizes are done with opaque windows and insanely over-featured window managers running on insanely speedy CPU and GPUs that spend more cycles idling than processors of yore counted in their entire lifetimes. :) > There isn't anything sacred about the pattern, though there are some words > in the protocol spec about what roughly will be there; there are other > possibilities that would meet the letter of the law. Xsun has an image file compiled into the server. > It is useful at times to see that pattern, as it tells you something > pretty definate about the state of the X server. Yup. > But changing it to something else is certainly possible: I did not detect > consensus on the xpert list of what to change it to, however. I think if there were: 1) support for setting the root window to a solid color on startup via a command-line option (and possibly via an XF86Config file flag) and 2) some borrowing of the Xsun splash screen code along with instructions on how to make your X server use a given image file ...most people would be pretty happy. Of course, 2) is pretty gratuitous if you can just use 1) to set the root window to a solid color like black or white, and then let the client side worry about splash screens. I mention 2) only because Xsun users have been spoiled by it. I don't know how color specification would be done. If I recall correctly all of X's fancy colorspace stuff is on the client side. (CMS?) -- G. Branden Robinson | Debian GNU/Linux | Extra territorium jus dicenti branden@debian.org | impune non paretur. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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