[rescue] OT: mozilla on IRIX

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Monday, October 15, 2001 at 03:00:25 (-0400), Patrick Giagnocavo wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [rescue] OT: mozilla on IRIX
>
> I am curious if you have seen any weird color flashing under Mozilla, or
> maybe that is just a result of the program being slower, to the extent
> that X commands being sent are not faster than sight.

"weird color flashing"?????

Do you mean _normal_ colormap swapping?  I.e. the feature which makes it
possible to use many applications simultaneously on an 8-bpp display?

If so then it's unlikely anyone's seen it with Mozilla unless they've
gone to the extent of figuring out how to make it work properly.  By
default Mozilla will only use the standard color map and will refuse to
install its own color map even if that means what it renders is
basically invisible or unreadable!

yesterday I finally spent several hours digging around and trying to
find out why the Mozilla developers have been such idiots and refused to
properly support 8-bpp displays.  It turns out that while the most
common response has been that they don't think 8-bbp hardware is worthy
of supporting (which should raise the ire of every "rescue" subscriber!)
there are a very few Mozilla developers who seem to understand the need,
but who percieve other problems with making it work properly, such as
how to get plugins and such to use the right map so that they appear to
be properly integrated.

In the end it turns out that they have, as of maybe 0.9.4 at least,
provided proper support for colormap swapping, and thus good (enough)
support for making Mozilla play nice on 8-bpp displays.  It's very
poorly documented, and even the description I found in their bugzilla is
incomplete.

Here's what you have to do.  Apply the following change to your
.../lib/mozilla/defaults/pref/unix.js file:

< pref("browser.ncols", 0);
< pref("browser.installcmap", false);
---
> pref("browser.ncols", 256);
> pref("browser.installcmap", true);


Setting installcmap to true is not enough alone (unlike what the poster
to bugzilla claimed).

Unfortunately imlib/gdkpixbuf/whatever they use isn't very good at
rendering images even when it has a good large color cube to work with.
They're still grainy -- better than xli does, but not near so good as xv.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods at acm.org>     <woods at robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods at planix.com>;   Secrets of the Weird <woods at weird.com>