Re: [AD] allegro on Solaris

[Evert Glebbeek <eglebbk@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> > I made an allegro app on a Solaris machine on the Sun architecture. The
> > machine has openwindows for an X implementation. The app was a windowed
> > program, and when i had the mouse inside the program the rest of the
> > screen would turn very dark, nearly black. The desktop was 8-bit depth,
> > but it didnt matter if i set the allegro program to 8 or 16, the same
> > problem occured. Someone on #allegro told me this might have been fixed on
> > cvs, but I could not try at the time.
> 
> Allegro 4.0.3 is known to work on some SPARC/Solaris machines with 24-bit 
> desktop depth. I don't think it has been tested with 8-bit.

Most workstations here run in 8 bit mode, so yes, it has been tested. I
get the same effect (see below).

> The current CVS 
> version doesn't have any additional fixes for these machines.

Wasn't there a recent patch that changed the colourmap allocation sceme under
X...? No wait, I was browsing through some Qt documentation and saw a flag for
that.

> Do you mean that the screen is very dark but not entirely black? So you can 
> see something on the screen?

When the Allegro program moves to the foreground, it takes over the desktop
palette, hence all background applications take on some eery colour, which
in most Allegro programs I've tried comes to black or dark blue mostly.
I never mentioned the problem because the same effect occurs when loading
other X applications that install their own colourmap. For instance, I get
the same effect with Acrobat reader, Maple and Mathematica. I can get the same
effect with Mozilla by telling it to use its own colourmap rather than the
system one. Most X applications have an option to change this behavior, but
Allegro does not. I never considered this a serious problem, since Allegro
doesn't process things like -geometry and other common switches too.
However, if Allegro grows more popular on UNIX workstations (it's a great
aid in visualization - I've used it several times already for displaying
numerical calculations), this may be something that has to be addressed.

> > Is this a known issue? I have no idea how to fix it,. but you could give me
> > hints and I can try them later.
> 
> The first thing to try is the various programs that are bundled with Allegro. 
> Do they exhibit the same behaviour? If so, Allegro probably makes some 
> assumptions in its code that break on SPARC/Solaris. I'm willing to correct 
> them as soon as possible.

I don't think it's a problem with SPARC/Solaris. In fact, I'd much expect a
similar effect on Linux X11 in 8 bit mode. Has anyone tried that? If not, I
may be able to test it out tonight.

I'm not sure if I'll be able to do much in the way of writing code. My time
has been rather sparse lately. :)

Evert