Subject: FVWM: 8 bit vs. 24 bit autoselect?

From: Steve Swamp <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1999 22:23:17 -0500

Ok, I'm sure this will show my ignorance of X servers, but I'll do my
best to make this intelligible.

I'm currently running fvwm 2.0.46 on Solaris 2.6, getting ready to go to
fvwm 2.1.x. Our Sparcs have 24-bit video cards in them, but the X server
is configured for applications to run in 8-bit mode by default.
Applications like ImageMagick and Netscape query the X server to figure
out the 24 bit support, and stat up in 24 bit mode. We can't change our
X server configuration to default to 24 bit because it breaks several of
our older design tools. So right now, fvwm starts up in 8 bit mode.

The question is - is 2.1.x able to query the X server to start in 24 bit
mode, or is there a quick change that can be made in the code to make it
default to 24 bit? Any chance of a feature being added here?

Thanks in advance,

Steve.

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---

From: Tim Phipps <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1999 14:42:36 +0000

> our older design tools. So right now, fvwm starts up in 8 bit mode.

Fvwm and the modules use the default visual which is probably a good
guess as it should minimize the amount of colormap flashing when going
from clients to menus etc..  Is it possible to persuade you older apps
to use a non default visual? I take it that your server can run both 8
and 24 bit visuals but you have the 8 bit one as default. If you can get
the default visual to be 24 bit you could try a "*visualID: PseudoColor"
in your .Xdefaults.  If you older apps are Motif they should pick this
up.

It is possible to hack fvwm to default to a non-default visual.  I guess
it would not be too bad for just fvwm but the modules should use the
same setting and that would involve changing all the modules.  Any
modules that swallow other clients would have big problems trying to
swallow clients with different depths and this would be more likely to
happen if the modules used a non-default visual.

Cheers,
Tim.