Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] TCP tools and 8-bit X/window displays

[Santeri Paavolainen <santtu@xxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 7 Jan 2003, Guy Harris wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 07, 2003 at 05:01:02PM -0800, Guy Harris wrote:
> > I could, I suspect, give myself an 8-bit X display at work by selecting
> > "256 colors" from the "Display Properties" control panel and restarting
> > the X server, and I could probably do the same at home by restarting the
> > X server with the appropriate command-line option.
>
> I tried that, and was able to get it to draw TCP graphs, so it's not as
> simple as "TCP graphs don't work with 8-bit color".

I remember color exhaustion as a common problem with 8-bit displays in the
Olde Days :-)

What happens is that when you tried ethereal, there were no programs
running that had grabbed any of colors, so the colormap was almost empty,
allowing ethereal to freely allocate its colors.

Try running xv or some other program that will grab a number of colors
(use non-dithered background image), then run ethereal. (Use image that
doesn't have colors close to the colors you are trying to allocate.)

Run xcmap to view the allocated (default) colormap. You could also run
"xstdcmap -all" to populate the colormap with default (static) color
allocations.

-- 
santtu@xxxxxxx                    I have become death, destroyer of the worlds.