Where have all my colors gone?

[Paul Asente]

In article <1990Nov14.160520.21543 at unx.sas.com> sasblc at unx.sas.com (Brad Chisholm) writes:
>I recently moved from an HP9000/300 workstation to a DECstation 3100 running
>UWS2.2.  Running mwm on the HP, the window manager would allocate a modest number of colors for its uses (~15).  On the DEC, however, running mwm results in 141 colors allocated, and running dxwm results in 128 colors allocated.  This seriously limits my ability to run applications that use shared colormaps.
>
>Any ideas about how I can reclaim these entries, or about what might be allocating them in the first place?  It doesn't seem likely that the window manager's entirely to blame...

Please put newlines in your messages.

It's almost certainly not mwm.  The DEC session manager uses the Display
PostScript extension to display the "DIGITAL" logo.  The Display PostScript
extension uses a color cube for rendering colors (if you run xshowcmap you
should see something that looks like a bunch of color ramps in your
colormap).

Two solutions:
	It looks like UWS4.0 does things more cleverly and doesn't allocate
	the color cube, just the one color it needs.  Update your software.
or
	Add the line
	*initializeDPS : False
	to the file /.Xdefaults (this is the file .Xdefaults in /, *not* the
	one in your home directory).  This makes the session manager display
	the logo without the Display PostScript extension (however, if you do
	this, the resulting logo is not offically correct!)

Armed with this information, clever users should be able to realize that you
can make the session manager display anything you want, not just "DIGITAL".
Look for interesting resource names in "strings /usr/bin/Xprompter".

	-paul asente
		asente at adobe.com	...decwrl!adobe!asente