Which 386 Unix offers Vga 256 color X-windows?
jim frost
madd at world.std.com
Sat Nov 18 04:39:51 AEST 1989
krist at stsci.EDU (John Krist) writes:
> I'm contemplating putting Unix on my 386 (Arche Rival). Reading
> the recent SCO Unix vs 386/ix review in Unix World (or was that
> Unix review?), they author indicated that neither vendor offers an
> X-windows which supports 256 colors in the high res VGA and Super-
> VGA modes.
> I would need some image display capabilities in whichever version
> I get, so 256 colors is essential. Does anyone know if either of
> these vendors now or is soon going to support these modes (or are they
> going to wait for the Super VGA standard to be defined?) ? I intend
> to probably use an ATI VGA Wonder card.
If I were to take a wild stab on which vendor would be first to
provide a usable 8-bit implementation, it'd be ISC. They seem to be
very dedicated to producing a good X server.
For the time being, I have some code to do image color depth reduction
which seems to work very well. It was developed for displaying 8-bit
images on the 4-bit display of the IBM RT (it's a general algorithm)
and seems to work fairly well if you really don't need the full color
resolution. You can get the software package, called xloadimage, from
expo.lcs.mit.edu via anonymous ftp (/contrib/xloadimage.tar.Z), or
from a recent posting in comp.sources.x. It currently handles X
bitmap (both X10 & X11), Sun Rasterfile images, Faces Project images,
and PBM images. GIF and XPM formats will be out soon. Besides depth
reduction, it does a number of other image manipulations (eg zoom,
brighten, dither). Might be useful to someone, and it certainly works
for me.
Happy hacking,
jim frost
sofware tool & die
madd at std.com
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