Colour problems with emacs-21.2 under Solaris and Motif

Colour problems with emacs-21.2 under Solaris and Motif

[Gary Mills]

I just compiled emacs-21.2 on Solaris 2.6 with this configuration:

	./configure \
	        --without-gcc \
	        --with-x-toolkit=motif

I'm running it under Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 with CDE.  I noticed
several peculiarities with the colours.  It seems mainly due to a
small number of missing colours.  This is not the usual problem with
some other application using up all the colours, by the way.  I checked
on that.  I'm assuming it is a Solaris or CDE problem.

Here's what I noticed:

1) Tooltips don't appear.  This error is generated:
   `Error while displaying tooltip: (error Undefined color lightyellow)'

2) The selected item in any menu is a black bar, with no text visible.

3) The error `Unable to load color "grey20"' shows up in the messages
   buffer.

4) Secondary menus have the default (bluish gray) background, not the
   gray background of the primary menu.

5) In the listing of all colours, some are missing.  This includes
   almost all colour names like COLOUR4, plus `lightyellow' and some
   of the greyNN colours.

My workaround was to add the following lines to the site-start.el file:

  (if (facep 'menu)
      (set-face-attribute 'menu nil :background "gray76" :foreground "black"))
  (if (facep 'tooltip)
      (set-face-attribute 'tooltip nil :background "LightYellow2" :foreground "black"))


-- 
-Gary Mills-    -Unix Support-    -U of M Academic Computing and Networking-

Re: Colour problems with emacs-21.2 under Solaris and Motif

[Richard Stallman]

Only a Solaris user can try to debug these problems.
Would you like to try investigating one of them?
It seems likely that they all result from one or two causes,
so tracking down the cause of any one might lead you to a fix
that would solve all of them.

Re: Colour problems with emacs-21.2 under Solaris and Motif

[Gary Mills]

On Wed, Sep 04, 2002 at 10:20:20AM -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
> Only a Solaris user can try to debug these problems.
> Would you like to try investigating one of them?
> It seems likely that they all result from one or two causes,
> so tracking down the cause of any one might lead you to a fix
> that would solve all of them.

Yes, I could do that.  The place to start seems to be Sun's CDE
X-window system.  There are many aspects of X-windows with which
I'm not familiar.  I'd need some pointers.  Is there a utility that
shows all the colours that are available, for example?  How would
you recommend debugging this problem?

-- 
-Gary Mills-    -Unix Support-    -U of M Academic Computing and Networking-

Re: Colour problems with emacs-21.2 under Solaris and Motif

[Gary Mills]

On Wed, Sep 04, 2002 at 10:20:20AM -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:

> It seems likely that they all result from one or two causes,
> so tracking down the cause of any one might lead you to a fix
> that would solve all of them.

I've already made progress.  All of the colours show up in emacs
under Solaris 8 at work.  They also all show up on my Solaris 9
development server at work.  It's only on my Solaris 9 workstation
at home that some colours are missing.

I'll investigate further, but I'm assuming now that this is not
an emacs problem.

-- 
-Gary Mills-    -Unix Support-    -U of M Academic Computing and Networking-