[Rule-list] Reducing color needs

[Marco Fioretti]

Chris,

I have to read your suggestions below a second time to understand them
all. Some extra suggestions for common discussion are:

1) wallpaper would not be installed by us, would they? Probably
however, we should put together some small documentation from your
tips so users can learn how to add them and minimize their cost.

2) The window manager itself (including in it icons, and any dock,
taskbar, panel thingies) can consume colors, so we should both go for
wms  that work without them (see corresponding page on web site) and
maybe provide some icons with less colors, maybe as a separate
package. Any idea about how to do this?

        Ciao,
                Marco Fioretti

----- Forwarded message from chris clark <address@hidden> -----


On machines with a shortage of available colors.....
Many older machines cannot display more than 256 colors, and X fails to ration 
these in a reasonable
way. as a result of the "first come, first served" philosophy, many times a 
color shortage results,
and annoying flashing and/or black/white displays occur.I don't really 
understand this, as the 

Some apps allow the limiting of how many colors they'll consume. It would be 
helpful to have them 
launched with conservative color usage by default.

Toward this end, I use "xsetroot -bg gray20 -fg gray40 -mod 8 8" to set my root 
window background.
(This sets a graph-paper pattern, and only used up two colors) 
using the mogrify command to color-reduce other wallpaper patterns helps, and 
old sun machines 
have a collection of xbm bitmaps which look decent, although I'd guess 
re-distributing them is
forbidden.

This is only a limited workaround, though. What I think would be a better 
solution is to have
color reduction in the X-server. Perhaps creating a readonly colormap 
containing the 
216 "netscape colors", or some other (user definable?) standard set, and then 
matching the 
requested color as closely as possible to it, rather than failing the attempt 
to allocate.
Some info on this is at:
http://www.motifzone.com/tmd/articles/John_Cwikla/xcc.1.html 
although this implies that the responsibility for colors lies with each 
individual app.

It seems to me that the general case solution is for this to be done at the 
server level,
so that old, naive apps would work well without rewrite.

Is there some good reason why this isn't done already? Perhaps my grasp of this 
is just
too limited.

----- End forwarded message -----

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