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Title: Color problems under X

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Color problems under X

Symptom:

  1. The application announces at the start:
    Cannot allocate colormap entry
    
  2. Colors change depending on which application is focused

Cause:

There are no more free color cells in the X server color palette. The program just started cannot use any new colors. The X server color depth is not sufficient.

The X server can be operated with several different color depths:

depending on the capabilities of the hardware and amount of video memory. Some chipsets only support 32 bit access to their video memory at 24 bit color depth resulting in some unused memory.

The default configuration works with a color palette (colormap) that contains 256 different color cells. If all of them are already used and an application requests further colors, this requests is denied by the Xserver with above message.

Specific programs react differently to the color shortage:

  1. The application renounces to display any of the colors and switches to black and white mode

  2. The application creates its own color palette. It is installed for the time the application holds the focus of input. The colors of all other applications are then displayed in ´wrong´ colors. This isn't an error, but an intended behaviour.

Solution:

Change the X server color depth as it is described in the article

http://www.suse.de/Support/sdb/maddin_bpp.html.

Hint:

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See also:

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Keywords: COLORS, X SERVER, COLORMAP, COLOR DEPTH, ARENA, CANNOT ALLOCATE COLORMAP, OLVWM, OPENWIN

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Feedback welcome: Send Mail to kfr@suse.de (Please give the following subject: SDB-colormap)

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SDB-colormap, Copyright SuSE GmbH, Nuremberg, Germany - Version: 23. Jul 1996
SuSE GmbH - Last generated: 07. Oct 1999 16:37:44 by maddin with sdb_gen 1.00.0