johnk@gordian.com (John Kalucki) (04/10/91)
If you have 2030's with 4-bitplane color boards, do not upgrade to RISCwindows 4.0. This appears to apply only to vintage 2030's- these boards have not been sold for a while. You will probably have color mapping headaches with 4.0. 8-bitplane boards appear to have no problems with 4.0. At my site, 4-bitplane boards have been used on monocrome displays to get 16 levels of grayscale on the 2030's. If everything isn't just stark black and white on your monocrome monitor, you may have a 4-bitplane board, but you could be lucky and have a 8-bitplane board. As far as I can tell, the only way to know for sure is to open the machine and look at the board. The 4-bitplane boards have every other ram missing (empty solder pods between the ram chips) RISCwindows4.0 thinks that the board is a fully populated 8-bitplane card. Each time you log in from xdm several of the colors will be mapped to 'random' colors and will stay as such for the entire session. For example use /usr/X11/contrib/xshowcmap and an account set up with the default .xresources and .xsession files provided in /usr/X11/etc/xdm. Log in and out several times to see colors change. Eventually you might get lucky and get white text on a white background, or some equally unreadable setup. Mips is currently working on a fix: ---------- The following bug report has been received by the bug system. It has been entered into the database as bug number 08436. submitter name: John Kalucki submitter org: Gordian submitter reference id: IR 10501 user severity: serious synopsis: RW4.0 doesn't map colours consistently on 4 bit greyscale monitors. ------ I hope this saves someone else some headaches. You can work around the problem somewhat by defining some colors, but I haven't managed to track them all down. -John Kalucki johnk@gordian.com