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From: mouse@LARRY.MCRCIM.MCGILL.EDU
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re:  Color on a Sun3
Message-ID: <9008210626.AA23944@Larry.McRCIM.McGill.EDU>
Date: 21 Aug 90 06:26:28 GMT
Sender: daemon@athena.mit.edu (Mr Background)
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 65

> We are running X11/R3 on a Sun3/60 with a color monitor.  We can run
> X in color mode by starting with 'xinit -- -dev /dev/cgfour'.  The
> default appears to be black and white.

Yes, in R3 the default was to come up on the 1-bit screen because color
was unusably slow.

> We have two requests: (1) can we either make use of this hidden
> screen, doubling our workspace (I understand one is color, the other
> is black and white),

Yes.  The "other" screen is simply screen 1 on your display.  To point
something at that screen, you can typically use -display :0.1 (if your
DISPLAY environment variable is something more complicated, replace the
piece after the colon with :<n>.1, where <n> is the first number after
the colon now).

> or can we prevent the wrap effect which is very disconcerting for the
> user whose display goes blank every time his curser slips off the
> edge.

I don't think R3 provided a way to do this.  R4 has a -zaphod option
which does what you want.  (Why "zaphod"?  From Zaphod Beeblebrox, a
character in _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ who had two heads.
A server running like this is said to be "multi-headed".)  If you use
-zaphod in R4, the second screen is still there; you just have to use
some other means to get the mouse onto it in order to see it.  (I have
two programs which can serve, if anyone wants.)

> (2) How can we tell xdm we want to use color mode.
(Is this a question or a statement?)

I know nothing about the R3 xdm, except that it is presumably something
like the R4 xdm.  The R4 xdm allows you to tell it what to run as the
server; this can be a shell script that runs the real server binary
with the required extra argument(s).

> Also, we would like to be able to switch between color/bw between
> sessions rather than have to kill xdm first.

I'd suggest you simply use the "monochrome"[%] screen as the default
and point your programs at display :0.1 when you want to use color.

> A related question is, will these problems all go away with R4.  We
> are currently upgrading to R4 and are under the impression that color
> under R4 does not have R3's serious performance problems.

Yes.  Color under R4 is only marginally slower than monochrome under
R3; it is definitely usable.  Consequently, under R4 the default, :0.0,
is the color screen, and the other screen, :0.1, is "monochrome".
(Notice that this means that once you switch to R4 color is no longer
going to be :0.1.)

[%] I put quotes around "monochrome" because the hardware is actually
    what X would call PseudoColor.  (PseudoColor with a two-entry
    colormap, to be sure, but still PseudoColor.)  The MIT server does
    not provide access to this facility, both because you don't
    necessarily *want* it to be PseudoColor and because it's difficult
    to tell the mono plane of a cg4 from a real bwtwo, which *is*
    monochrome.

					der Mouse

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