Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!DINORAH.WUSTL.EDU!kek
From: kek@DINORAH.WUSTL.EDU
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: More questions about phoney cursor behavior -- apollo this time
Message-ID: <8904051514.AA26769@dinorah.wustl.edu>
Date: 5 Apr 89 15:14:57 GMT
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 33


(Bob Scheifler replied to RUSTY)
>The Sun ddx simply allocates read-only entries out of the default colormap
>(and I don't think it ever frees them).  Yanking an arbitrary number of colors
>away from the user is unfriendly.  Always allocating out of the default map
>is incorrect for windows that use other colormaps.  There is no guarantee that
>the allocation will succeed (the server is technically permitted to fail in
>this operation, but it isn't very desirable to do so).

Config:  Apollo DM 3000, XR3 fixes 1-8, std make World using TCP only.

We have noticed many time how frail the cursor is on sample server for
apollo.  The X looses its white outline immediately and occasionally
picks up what looks like fuzz after some unknown number of operations.
Even more aggravating is that the cursor does some kind of XORing of
the pixels over which it passes.  This is most obviously seen if we
mouse over to the colorchart client which is a 16x16 grid of all of
the (256) pixel values to give visual confirmation to the way we think
the colormap is being used.  Here, it is seen that the X cursor always
takes on the odd value which is equal to or one greater than the
pixels it is overwriting.  The effect is pretty spectacular when it
appears that the cursor passes _over_ some structures but _under_
others depending whether numeric value of that color is even or odd
(today).  Real frustration comes when you try to move the cursor in a
region which is large compared to the cursor and whose pixel value is
odd.  Here the cursor has no contrast (without its outline) and so, is
not seen. It really makes pointing difficult.

has anyone else seen/fixed this?  

BTW The beta server from Apollo does _not_ exhibit this difficulty but
we haven't switched over to that until we have ironed out window
manager issues (dm vs uwm).