Re: enlightenment and gnome colormap problems

["Mark R. Bowyer" <Moredhel earthling net>]

>From: Havoc Pennington <hp@redhat.com>

>Audie Hanpachern <audie_hanpachern@yahoo.com> writes:
>> I'm trying to get e16 and gnome to run on a solaris
>> box under 8 bit color and am having troubles with the
>> colormap. When I just start enlightenment, everything
>> is fine. However, when I launch gnome/panel, my
>> colormap gets completely screwed up. Gnome seems to
>> get all the colors it needs, but all my window manager
>> features(title bars, menus...) have screwy colors.
>> Does anyone know what a solution to this may be? 
>> 
>
>You're pretty screwed, between them GNOME and E16 are going to chew
>your entire colormap and more, resulting in bad things. Try using
>Sawfish with a simple theme, perhaps.


Unfortunately it's not really a colourmap issue.  You'd probably see this on a 
24-bit Sun framebuffer too.  I have.

Since Gnome 1.2, E and Gnome's panel have had an arguement over the use of Imlib 
on Solaris.  It's not just that the colourmap gets screwed (in my experience - 
this *may* not be the same thing).  The borders actually get corrupted, so that 
you have problems clicking on them, as areas of the shaped borders have actually 
gone.  It's like the dithering has gone a bit nuts and left areas of the border 
transparent.  But as I say, I've seen it on my 24-bit screen, too.

Now, this only appears to happen on Solaris, and apparently is fixed in the 
Xserver in an early alpha of Solaris 8 Update 3.  It also seems much reduced in 
the Solaris 9 Alpha_19 build I'm using.  Note that I'm running it all on an 
Ultra10 with 2 8-bit PGXs and 1 24-bit Elite3D, and the dithering in Imlib works 
wonders in ensuring that things don't get *too* screwed up on 8-bit screens, no 
matter *how* colourful your theme and background are.  I had a screenshot on 
e.theme.org last week that showed that =O)  It's one of the reasons I fell in 
love with Enlightenment, having spent years going through SunView, Openlook2 
OpenLook3 and CDE to get here =O{

This is currently keeping me from having the Gnome panel running on my system.  
How much of it is really down to Sun's Xserver, and how much might be down to 
Gnome expecting their own imlib 1.9.8.1, which is actually 1.9.7 with some 
Gnome-only fixes that haven't been handed back to the original libraries 
maintainer, while Enlightenment prefers the real 1.9.8, which has a fix for a 
memory leak that doesn't appear to be in 1.9.8.1, but doesn't have the other 
Gnome fixes, I don't know.  Long sentence, sorry.  The point is that the Gnome 
team appear to have forked an important library without telling anyone, and this 
could be the cause of this, if not other, problems.  Apparently it's starting to 
cause issues on Debian, too.

Either way, this doesn't provide the original poster an answer.  One solution 
might be to use Sawfish.  Another might be what I do - to just use Enlightenment 
without relying on the Panel or Gnome-session, and use the Enlightenment Menu 
system to access all the nice Gnome applications.  Either will keep the window 
border blues at bay.  Choose whichever suits your use of the products.  And wait 
for an OS upgrade that fixes this, if indeed this is a Sun bug.  Or an OS 
upgrade that comes with Gnome as the Window Manager anyway =O)

Good luck,

---------My opinion - Not sane, intelligent or necessarily useful---------
o o                                          mailto:Moredhel@earthling.net 
/v\ark R. Bowyer.    http://Moredhel.i.am    mailto:Mark.Bowyer@UK.Sun.COM
`-'  "Micro$oft have performed an illegal operation and will be shut down"