How does Wabi access the colormap?
When Wabi is initialised, it uses a technique which seemed to the designers to be the best way of reducing colormap flashing – it allocates the entire colormap, and fills it with a colour cube and a selection of other colours. The theory behind this was that, when an application asked for a new colour there would be a colour available which was reasonably close to that requested, if not matching exactly. The server would offer this to the application and there would be no flashing. Unfortunately, when XAllocColor returns saying that it could not allocate the colour, rather than accept this “close match” practically every application ever written goes away and allocates a private colormap. Few of them use the techniques outlined in this document, so the net result is that colormap flashing is exacerbated rather than reduced! The solution therefore is to start Wabi after all other colormap intensive programs have been started (particularly SunPC, and DPS or NeWS applications) Newer relea
