Number of Colors on CDE on HP-UX 11.00

[luigimilano]

If I start applications in a wrong way (first OSD Manager Desktop then OSD Modeling) OSD Modeling appear in a completly white windows. If I start the applications first OSD Modeling then OSD Manager all it's ok, what happens? Is there a workaround to fix it?

Thanks
Best Regards

[clausb]

Some ideas:

Try to configure CDE so that it uses less colors for itself and leaves more for applications. In VUE, this used to be in Style Manager/Colors. Not sure about CDE.

If you are using other color-hungry apps, such as Netscape, look up their colormap configuration capabilities (*maxImageColors, *installColormap).

Hope this helps,

Claus

[luigimilano]

The colors are better but the problem, in some cases, remain.

Thanks Claus

[clausb]

I think the problem came up before, and our support folks might have more information on this, so I'd suggest to have a chat with them.

Claus

[luigimilano]

If with support folks you mean italian support (CDM Isigraf) they can't help me, I subject them the problem more than 1 years ago, otherwise can you tell me with I must chat to solve my problem?

Thanks Claus

[clausb]

The CDM folks probably already contacted our backend support here at CoCreate, so maybe there is no previous wisdom on this problem. (My recollections of this case are very faint anyway, and I might be mixing up things.)

Anyway, the problem is of course that several apps are fighting for color cells on your system. On most HP-UX systems, the UI is displayed in the so-called overlay planes which have a color depth of 8 bits, i.e. the maximum number of colors is 256.

We could try to further minimize color consumption in the applications you use.

If you are running Netscape, for example, try tuning it by changing resource settings in Netscape.ad (or in your .Xdefaults/.vuedefaults etc. file):


Set *visualID to "Default" (HP) and *maxImageColors to 32 (or any value which is sufficient to fix the specific color allocation problem in your configuration). Images in Netscape will appear dithered now, but Netscape will use a whole lot less colors than before.
Set *installColormap to "Yes" if you have a graphics board which supports multiple hardware colormaps.


Alternatively, try the following:


Run Netscape with the "-install" option. This will tell Netscape to install and use a separate colormap, which might help (depending on how much hardware colormap your graphics board supports). This is equivalent to the "*installColormap" resource file setting.
You can use the "-ncols" option to limit the number of colormap cells Netscape will use.
Try running Netscape with the "-visual TrueColor?" option.


If tuning individual apps isn't enough,
there are probably other tuning mechanisms in X11/Motif/CDE to influence color allocation. I'm not too familiar with all this, however. One brute force approach would be to force the OSD Manager window into the image planes which have a color depth of 24 bits (on most systems at least).

The trivial way to do this is to tell the X server to display all UI windows in the image planes by adding something like the following to the X0screens file:

Screen /dev/crt
DefaultVisual
Class TrueColor
Depth 24
Layer Image

However, this will force all UI elements into the image planes, including those in OSD Modeling, which will cause more redraws when moving menus and dialogs over the viewports, so this is probably not really what you want, either. Hope I can chase up some other tricks, but at this point, this is all I can think of. You might also be able to consult the HP-UX graphics administration guide which might contain more background on color allocation.

Claus

[clausb]

I checked with our support folks today, and was told that there we already had a few calls about similar issues, and that there are some workarounds which might help you.

The basic problem is this: In the standard X11 configuration under HP-UX, UI elements are displayed in the so-called "overlay planes" which have a color depth of 8 bit, i.e. can display a maximum of 256 colors. When running several applications which use, for instance, icons which use a color palette of 256 colors each, the system will, at some point, run out of colors for additional applications - and then all you're getting are white windows.

One way to fix this is force UI windows into the image planes (see my previous posting). Another way is to use a color-reduced set of icons for the affected applications. Basically, what's needed are a few file format conversions and a tool which can reduce color depths in icon files (such as IrfanView). A third way is to migrate to Windows where the problem doesn't occur, but that's a rather complex workaround for this kind of problem :-)

Our backend support here in Sindelfingen has more information on the icon conversion process, so I'd suggest you contact CDM Isigraf again, referring them to this discussion. They can then get the necessary tools and details from CoCreate support and supply it to you.

Hope this helps,

Claus

[luigimilano]

I'll contact CDM Isigraf again

Thank for your time Claus