Re: White Screen of Death

[Adam Fedor]

On Tuesday, February 11, 2003, at 06:44 AM, Frank D. Engel, Jr. wrote:

> I am trying to get GNUStep working with NetBSD (1.6, I think) on a
> SparcStation LX (32-bit, 8bpp framebuffer, 96MB RAM).
>
> The NetBSD package system was able to successfully install the libs (I
> think; with a number of warnings): base, gui, back, etc. are all
> installed.
>
> When I try to run GWorkspace, however (also from the package system),
> the screen turns white, except for any non-GNUStep windows (wterm, the
> WindowMaker dock), after hinting at the menus, etc. being drawn.
>
> If I try to start GWorkspace without gdnc, etc., these seem to draw
> correctly, and I get an error message, but interactivity still fails (I
> cannot seem to interact with any of the objects on screen; I need to go
> back to the wterm and kill the GWorkspace process).
>
> Does anyone have any clues as to what might cause this to happen, and
> how I might go about diagnosing and repairing this?
Probably because you have an 8bit screen - GNUstep tries to grab all 
the colors it can, leaving none for any other apps. The best way to fix 
this is to define a standard colormap (you need to do this before you 
start up you window manager, so it will use the same colormap):

xstdcmap -best

for instance.  You could also try to reduce the number of colors 
GNUstep uses, although I don't really recommend that, by setting the 
NSColorsPerChannel default. See

http://www.gnustep.org/resources/documentation/gui/DefaultsSummary.html