[rescue] Weird Silicon Graphics o2 graphics issues

[Phil Stracchino]

On Thu, Oct 02, 2003 at 09:48:00AM +0300, Meelis Roos wrote:
> > Sure. I used Mozilla on a 8 bit Xterminal and on an old Alpha with 8 bit
> > TGA graphics card...
> 
> That reminds me of a problem on my SGI. I use my SGI Indy (the lowest,
> R4600PC 100 MHz, 32M RAM, 8-bit graphics) as an X-terminal for my main
> computer. tI mostly works fine but sometimes I run out of colors. In
> this situation some applications behave well, do some dithering and all
> is fine (ImageMagick, Qt programs). But some programis like Mozilla (and
> all other browsers based on the mozilla core), mplayer etc show mangled
> colormap. There are quite several of them.
> 
> I first thought it to be a Mozilla problem - I have seen distored images
> like this before (like some videoconf tools on sparcolaris via a remote
> little-endian X server), no biggie. But since there is no endian
> conversion going on in my case and quite several applications fail this
> way that used to work on my other 8-bit X servers, I started to suspect
> a Xsgi probem. Now your talk about Mozilla & 8bit makes me think even
> more that it is the SGI that is at fault.


In the case you have described, this is perfectly normal behavior for
Mozilla and is not an SGI bug.  Mozilla will, by default, work with the
colormap it's got and not step on anything else, but if something else
has already allocated most or all of the available colormap it's not
going to be able to do a very good job of rendering images.

You can work around this, if you wish, by starting Mozilla with the
-install option to make it install a private colormap.  This will let
Mozilla render images better in 8-bit pseudocolor, but there will be a
very visible side-effect -- every time you switch focus to and from
Mozilla, screen colors will flash as the colormap switches.  You may or
may not find this annoying.


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