[25860] in Athena Bugs
sun4 9.3.8: xwrapper
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jacob Morzinski)
Sun Jul 25 16:41:29 2004
Message-Id: <200407252041.i6PKfN1c024240@hodge-podge.mit.edu>
To: bugs@mit.edu
Date: Sun, 25 Jul 2004 16:41:23 -0400
From: "Jacob Morzinski" <jmorzins@mit.edu>
Errors-To: bugs-bounces@mit.edu
System name: hodge-podge.mit.edu
Type and version: Ultra-5_10 9.3.8 (with mkserv)
Display type: m
I don't know if the issue I mention here is an uncommon problem that
affects specific machines, or is a general problem that will affect
large groups of machines. I'll report it, to help spread awareness.
This machine, hodge-podge, was recently reinstalled to 9.3.
The installation process went well, except that at the end,
the machine was running X in 8-bit mode.
I was able to reconfigure the machine back into 24-bit mode, but
it is worth pointing out that manual intervention was needed to
do this -- /etc/athena/xwrapper did not launch X in 24-bit mode.
I've had to wrestle with fbconfig a few times in the past month,
and I've discovered that in situations where plain fbconfig does
not create a lasting change to the display configuration, it is
possible to get a lasting change by using fbconfig's "-file" option.
I haven't figured out the difference between "-file system" and
"-file machine", but can get the results I want by running fbconfig
twice, once with each "-file" option.
So, for example, I corrected hodge-podge out of 8-bit mode and into
24-bit mode by running the two commands:
m64config -file system -res 1152x900x76 -depth 24
m64config -file machine -res 1152x900x76 -depth 24
I don't know what situations cause the "-file" option to be
necessary. I don't know if xwrapper should be modified; maybe
you could wait and see if other people have 8-bit problems.
Here's a shell trace of running xwrapper, included to demonstrate
that xwrapper does indeed reach the m64 24-bit branch of the shell
script. As mentioned above, the m64config command is ineffective.
% sh -x /etc/athena/xwrapper
+ [ -f /etc/athena/x-no-wrapper ]
+ /bin/athena/machtype -d
framebuf=m
options=
+ [ -f /var/athena/x-8-bit ]
mode=24
+ rm -f /var/athena/x-8-bit
+ m64config -defaults
+ m64config -res 1152x900x76 -depth 24
+ exec /usr/openwin/bin/Xsun
-Jacob Morzinski
