Xterm and .Xresources

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers,,,781-647-1813)]

Derek Martin <dmartin at lancity.COM> writes:
	On Thu, 2 Sep 1999, John Chambers wrote:

	On this machine, and on many other linuxes that
	> I've used in the past few years, whenever I run  gv  it  gives  me  a
	> popup complaining about about a number of missing colors:
	> 
	> 	Warning: Cannot allocate colormap entry for "AntiqueWhite2"
	> 	Warning: Cannot allocate colormap entry for "AntiqueWhite4"
	> 	Warning: Cannot allocate colormap entry for "gray90"
	> 	Warning: Cannot allocate colormap entry for "#D3B5B5"

	The problem, probably the most common one with X, is that your out of
	color table entries.  You almost undoubtedly are running an 8-bit (256
	color) display.  You can set all the resources you like, and you'll still
	have the same problem.  To fix it, you need to figure out if you can run
	your video card at a higher color depth (probably you can), and then use
	some method to start X at the higher depth.  

Well, I don't believe this is quite true.  It's  probably  true  that
this  is  an 8-bit display.  But I don't think it's true that I can't
get the colors I want.  I don't want the above colors; gv wants  them
and  I  can't convince it otherwise.  I can see xterms that are using
colors such as black, grey40, green, yellow and cyan.  So I know that
those  colors  are  in  fact  available.   If I knew the names of the
resources that gv is trying to get, I could set  those  resources  in
the  X server to green or cyan or grey40, and gv would be able to get
those colors.  But I can't do this, because I don't know the names of
the four resources that it's trying to get colors for.

The problem isn't to make AntiqueWhite2 or #D3B5B5 work. I don't much
care  that  I  get  those  exact colors.  What I want is to get those
widgets to use something more  readable  than  white-on-white,  which
seems to be what gv does if it can't get the colors it wants.  I'd be
happy to make them cyan-on-grey40 or yellow-on-black.  But no  matter
what I do, gv asks for the above four colors, and when this fails, it
defaults to white-on-white.

This seems to be a standard (mis)behavior of gv (and  assorted  other
apps).  I can demo it on any number of systems.

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