[16163] in Athena Bugs
Re: 24 bpp X servers
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Fri Aug 14 14:17:53 1998
Date: Fri, 14 Aug 1998 14:17:51 -0400
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: Yoav Yerushalmi <yoav@MIT.EDU>
Cc: bugs@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: "[16158] in Athena Bugs"
> So, I've often asked "why aren't we running 24 bits X servers even
> though the hardware can support it?" and often been told that some
> software breaks on it.
On the SGIs, where the hardware supports 24 bits, the default visual
is typically 8-bit, but some applications like Netscape will find the
24-bit visual and use it. So you still win in some respects (such as
netscape not stealing all of your colormap). This is also true on the
Ultra 1, and presumably on the Ultra 10 (but I'm too lazy to check
right now).
> Well, I figured, since I've been using 24 bit servers here and have
> been running most of the popular Athena software, maybe I should ask
> what exactly is broken
The 8.1 release was going to introduce a default 24-bit visual on the
SGI. We ran into one problem during the test cycle (beta or early, I
don't remember), a courseware application named "ewb" for which we did
not have source and for which there was no longer a vendor. We didn't
know what else might break, and there's really no workaround if things
do break.
I was thinking of maybe trying to write a proxy X server which passed
through everything but munged the default visual ID, so that we could
run 24-bit servers and still have this hack as a workaround for
applications which broke. Craig thought that might be difficult,
though.
