Thanks for the answers, Jon and Ben: I think Jon might be right (with his long answer), because I do remember running a program on a remote computer that really looked like it was running with 24bpp, even though my local applications looked horrible.
I'm seeing the wacky behavior when I run Outlook Express (for Solaris) and Gnome/Sawfish. Both look like they have an 8 bit colormap. I'll try playing with my .Xdefaults or .Xresources file .. the -defdepth and the -bpp tricks didn't work with xinit. -Sageev ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jon Leonard" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Sageev George" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <debian-sparc@lists.debian.org> Cc: "Jon Leonard" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, July 26, 2002 4:21 PM Subject: Re: Changing Creator3D depth settings in Solaris > On Fri, Jul 26, 2002 at 03:51:14PM -0700, Sageev George wrote: > > Hi, > > Forgive the off-topic nature of this request, but > > I've been trying to fairly compare Debian > > and Solaris 8 on my Ultra 30. The computer has > > a Creator3D in it. I was able to set the > > bit depth to 24 bits in Debian without too > > much trouble, but I have no idea how to change > > my depth from 8 bits to 24 bits in Solaris. > > Short answer: -defdepth 24 (Or something similar; it's been years and it'd > be in the X server man page) > > The longer answer is that the Creator3D card and its relatives support > multiple bit depths simultaneously, on a per-window basis. It's selected > in the WindowID planes. A program that's aware of this can select the > visual it wants, so you can run 24 bit programs even in the nominally 8-bit > mode, and it works fine. The only difference is in the order that the > server presents the list of available visuals, so naive programs just take > the first one in the list. The decision to make the default 8 bit was made > because there was still at the time a wide variety of common programs that > just assumed 8-bit displays, and misbehaved badly otherwise... > > Jon Leonard > -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]