Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!haven!purdue!bu-cs!mirror!rayssd!raybed2!linus!heart-of-gold!jc
From: jc@heart-of-gold (John M Chambers)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: comp.windows.x
Keywords: colormap monochrome
Message-ID: <188@heart-of-gold>
Date: 17 Jan 89 15:33:56 GMT
Organization: Mitre Corp, Bedford, MA, USA
Lines: 40

Well, as a bemused installer of XX11R3, I now have the opportunity to see 
if this newsgroup is a good source of consulting help... (;-)

The problem is that, after several days of coming up and running somewhat
happily, xinit suddenly picked up some curious new behavior.  When I run
xinit, it says:

| X Toolkit Warning: Cannot allocate colormap entry for "White"
| X Toolkit Warning: Cannot allocate colormap entry for "Black"
| X Toolkit Warning: Cannot allocate colormap entry for "white"
| X Toolkit Warning: Cannot allocate colormap entry for "black"
| 
| waiting for X server to shut down 

It then starts up the server and an xterm, which comes up with its window
white-on-white.  I can actually use the window normally, but no text ever
appears.  I can do things like "uwm&", and uwm comes up.  When I ask uwm
to start, for instance, an xmh, it works, and the window and buttons all
look normal, but the text windows are white-on-white.

The thing to understand is that this is a Sun 3/260 with a monochrome
display.  I've wandered through the manuals, trying to figure out what
I might have told it that makes it think this is a color display, and
perhaps in a week or a month or a year I'd eventually figure it out, if
I were to persevere.  But it'd sure be nice if someone more knowledgeable 
than I could tell me how I convince it that the display is monochrome.

It seems that there oughta be some sort of startup file for xinit (like
the .suntools file for Suntools), but I can't find any mention of it (or
maybe I'm not recognizing it when I read it) in the manuals.  So far, I've
been starting up wm or uwm by hand, then opening up other windows by hand,
and positioning them by hand.  This is getting old; it seems like there
should be some way to automate it, known to experienced users, and probably
described on page 157 of the manual.  Any pointers?

-- 
From:	John Chambers <heart-of-gold.mitre.org!jc>
From	...!linus!!heart-of-gold!jc (John Chambers 617/217-2285)
[The above opinions were packaged by volume, not by weight;
some settling of contents may have occurred during distribution.]