VanLUG Email Archive
Curt Sampson (cjs@cynic.net)
Tue, 19 Jan 1999 13:33:17 -0800 (PST)
On Tue, 19 Jan 1999 bbarnett@L8R.net wrote:
> I must interject here, and mention that multiple screen sizes, with multiple
> depths, is not a new thing. You CAN change and/or add a screen of different
> depth, without effecting current applications.. the api just has to be set up
> to handle this.
Correct. Setting up applications to handle this is not trivial.
> Let me put it another way. If the amiga, a 12 year old os can do it, then
> linux can do it.
This is nothing to do with Linux; it's entirely an X11 issue.
The real question you have to ask yourself is, `is it worth changing
X11 to do this?' Applications developers have only so much time on
their hands; do we really want them to spend time teaching their
applications how to deal with a sudden colour change rather than
working on new features, or stability, or whatever?
Windows probably has a colour model that's different to X11's, and
makes this sort of thing easier, but other things harder. One of
the things you'll notice missing in Windows is private colourmaps:
if a screen has only 256 colours available, and two applications
each need 200 colours that are different from those in the other
application, X11 can assign each a private colourmap and deal with
it. (The application with the focus will have correct colours; the
other will be more or less random.) Is this something you'd give
up in X11 to have dynamic changing of the server's colour depth?
cjs
-- Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net> 604 801 5335 De gustibus, aut bene aut nihil. The most widely ported operating system in the world: http://www.netbsd.org
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