Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!hc!lll-winken!uunet!hsi!stpstn!aad
From: aad@stpstn.UUCP (Anthony A. Datri)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Can't get color... Why?
Message-ID: <3105@stpstn.UUCP>
Date: 2 Apr 89 22:45:27 GMT
References: <1730001@otter.hpl.hp.com> <8903301545.AA05055@expo.lcs.mit.edu>
Reply-To: aad@stepstone.com
Organization: The Stepstone Corporation, Sandy Hook, CT
Lines: 34

>The ability to see colors in a window depends on 2 things:
>    + The size of your colormap, and whether the colormap is 
>      writeable by client programs such as xchess.  Use xdpyinfo
>      to find out the size of your display's colormap

I'd be happy if I could find something to tell me just what a colormap *IS*.
eg, I'm on a Sun 4/110 with a cgfour -- xdpyinfo tells me that there
are 256 colormap cells.  I can run

ico -faces -colors  aquamarine MediumAquamarine CadetBlue CornflowerBlue \
DarkSlateBlue LightBlue LightSteelBlue MediumBlue MediumSlateBlue \
MidnightBlue violetred pink violet brown yellow thistle goldenrod

just fine at the moment, when I have maybe 10 colors in use, including two
I specified with #rgb values.  I also just ran about 20 xterm's, with
unique -fg args.  Everything worked fine.  But when I tried an xterm -fg
mediumslategray, I got

X Toolkit Warning: Cannot allocate colormap entry for "mediumslategray"

I looked in /usr/lib/X11/rgb.txt, and lo and behold, there isn't a
mediumslategray defined (I was confusing it with the mediumslateblue entry).
Now, I've been troubled by what I thought was a problem with these colormaps,
whatever they are, but now I think my problems are due to confusion between
"no colormap cells available" and "unknown color", which seem to generate the
same message.  I just tried out an HP machine, which reports 16 colormap
entries, and it seemed to verify the above:  I tried from a similar setup to
the one on the Sun an "xterm -goldenrod", and got the above message.  I
killed off my uwm, freeing some colors, and I was able to fire up the xterm.
-- 
@disclaimer(Any concepts or opinions above are entirely mine, not those of my
	    employer, my GIGI, my VT05, or my 11/34)
beak is@>beak is not
Anthony A. Datri @SysAdmin(Stepstone Corporation) aad@stepstone.com stpstn!aad