Subject: FVWM: debian colors in X behave strange..

From: Dick Hoogendijk <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 18 Jan 2003 21:54:00 +0100

I haven't find an answer to a question that is important for me.
Something happens to colors in the debian distro that is NOT happening
in other linux distro's NOR FreeBSD.

Blanking the screen in X (xlock -mode blank) leaves me NOT w/ a black
screen. It's blanked and *gray* ???

Starting Midnight Commander gives me a LIGHT.blue screen instead of a
DARK.blue as happens in all other distro's.

I can go on like this. I get the feeling that *some* where kind of a
high bit is set that makes my screen give unnatural colors; that is, not
the colors that suppose to appear.

The distor behaves OK on cli colors, so I guess it must be something in
X that is set different by debian. I have absolutely NO idea where to
look.

The reason I ask here is that I really love fvwm and all my windows have
different background that I like to see the way I designed them ;-))

Can someone give me a hint where to look for this behaviour?

-- 
dick -- http://www.nagual.st/ -- PGP/GnuPG key: F86289CE
++ Running FreeBSD 4.7 ++ Debian GNU/Linux (Woody)
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---

From: Ben Winslow <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 18 Jan 2003 18:16:48 -0500

> Can someone give me a hint where to look for this behaviour?

A couple of ideas come immediately to mind:

a) Perhaps X is running in 8bpp mode and is having trouble grabbing
colors?  I think the normal behavior in that case is to use black
instead of a closely matching color, though.  Run 'xdpyinfo' and look at
the depth information, especially the line saying 'depth of root window'.
b) Some display modes will cause some monitors to be extremely bright
when they're normally much darker.  If *everything* seems way too
bright, and especially if everything that's supposed to be black looks
gray, that's probably the case.  (Be sure to use a large area of black
to decide whether or not it's gray.)  Since the black level is so high
in this case, the only choices are to use another display mode or adjust
 the brightness on your monitor.

Those are the best ideas I can think of right now.  Debian's default
rxvt configuration has colors that pretty closely match the default VGA
palette, but if you think this might be the problem, you can grab my old
rxvt .Xresources snippet from http://themuffin.net/xres/ (there's an
xterm version there, too, but if you use the whole xterm config it'll
make the terminal charset utf-8.)  The color section in each matches the
console exactly, since I'm picky like that. ;)

-- 
Ben

---

From: Jan Exss <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 19 Jan 2003 10:53:20 +0100 (CET)

> DARK.blue as happens in all other distro's.

For some reason the Xresources have been changed in Debian woody. To get
back the original colors in the midnight commander I use the following
entries in the $HOME/.Xresources file

*VT100*color0: black
*VT100*color1: red3
*VT100*color2: green3
*VT100*color4: blue3
*VT100*color5: magenta3
*VT100*color6: cyan3
*VT100*color7: gray90
*VT100*color8: gray30
*VT100*color9: red
*VT100*color10: green
*VT100*color11: yellow
*VT100*color12: blue
*VT100*color13: magenta
*VT100*color14: cyan
*VT100*color15: white
*VT100*colorUL: yellow
*VT100*colorBD: white

Maybe this is also a way to change the behavior of the blank screen.
Good luck.

Jan.

---

From: dick hoogendijk <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 19 Jan 2003 12:27:55 +0100

On 18 Jan Ben Winslow wrote:
> colors?

Nope.. running 24bpp

> console exactly, since I'm picky like that. ;)

I will fetch these files today to have a closer look.
In the meantime I found out that marking a line in debians Xresources
quoted hereunder helps to get rid off the lightblue background in mc and
returns the normal darkblue screen. Blanking the screen w/ password
still gives a gray background when asked for the passwd.

=-=-=-=-
! /etc/X11/Xresources/xfree86-common

! load color-specific resources for clients that have them
#ifdef COLOR
#*customization: -color   <-- THE unwanted rule..
#endif
=-=-=-=-

I'm still puzzled why the colors of my windows are so different from the
ones running under freebsd, but that's another thread.

---

From: dick hoogendijk <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 19 Jan 2003 12:34:52 +0100

On 19 Jan Jan Exss wrote:
 
> For some reason the Xresources have been changed in Debian woody. To
> get back the original colors in the midnight commander I use the
> following entries in the $HOME/.Xresources file
> 
> *VT100*color0: black
> *VT100*color1: red3
> *VT100*color2: green3
> *VT100*color4: blue3
> *VT100*color5: magenta3
> *VT100*color6: cyan3
> *VT100*color7: gray90
> *VT100*color8: gray30
> *VT100*color9: red
> *VT100*color10: green
> *VT100*color11: yellow
> *VT100*color12: blue
> *VT100*color13: magenta
> *VT100*color14: cyan
> *VT100*color15: white
> *VT100*colorUL: yellow
> *VT100*colorBD: white

Tried this with no luck. The main midnight commander screen was already
'normal' again changing a line in /etc/X11/Xresources/xfree86-common

I will look closer into the differences between X running on debian
linux and my X runnign on FreeBSD.

I use the thememanager (default) for FVWM and get very nice colors in
different screens (running on fbsd).
Using exactly the same theme on debian woody changes the color that's in
the config file. F.i.: mc runs w/ white on darkgreen in the theme..
FreeBSD honors this, debian woody changes the background into one of its
own. I wnat to know *where* this is configured in woody, because as is
I'm not able to define the colors _I_ want ;-((

---

From: Russell <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 19 Jan 2003 23:03:54 +1100

> I'm not able to define the colors _I_ want ;-((

MC uses the xterm colors in /etc/X11/app-defaults/XTerm-color. These colors
map to the console colors. The first 0-7 are low intensity, 8-15 are full
intensity. You can use rrggbb numbers instead of named colors too.