What happened to pseudocolor?

[Christopher Jacoby]

Hi folks.

Thank you in advance for your help.

I have a somewhat old X app that requires pseudocolor. With TigerVNC 1.1.0-16.el6 (ships with RHEL 6) the pseudocolor works fine.

However, I'd like to use PAM authentication, which does not appear to be an option with 1.1.0-16.el6. Now, I've downloaded 1.4.3, where the PAM works fine, but pseudocolor doesn't!

Is pseudocolor support just plain gone from recent releases? Will I have to compile this myself to get PAM and pseudocolor? Is there a version somewhere between these two versions that will support both PAM and pseudocolor? 

Thank you,

Chris

Output:

vncserver -cc 3 -depth 8

WARNING: The first attempt to start Xvnc failed, possibly because the font

catalog is not properly configured.  Attempting to determine an appropriate

font path for this system and restart Xvnc using that font path ...

Could not start Xvnc.

Xvnc TigerVNC 1.4.3 - built Mar  1 2015 15:46:57

Copyright (C) 1999-2015 TigerVNC Team and many others (see README.txt)

See http://www.tigervnc.org for information on TigerVNC.

Underlying X server release 11202000, The X.Org Foundation

Mon Jun 15 15:58:50 2015

 vncext:      VNC extension running!

 vncext:      Listening for VNC connections on all interface(s), port 5901

 vncext:      Listening for HTTP connections on all interface(s), port 5801

pseudocolour not supported

[DRC]

Short answer-- yep, it's gone. The longer answer is that PseudoColor is
minimally not very well tested with "modern" (< 10 years old) window
managers and GUI toolkits, and I would venture to say that some recent
projects don't test it at all. Even in versions of TigerVNC that did
support PseudoColor, I could make Gnome 2 crash at the speed of light by
trying to start it under TigerVNC with -depth 8. However, this seems to
be somewhat dependent on the platform. In my case, I observed the
issues with CentOS 5 (Gnome 2.16.x) but not CentOS 6 (Gnome 2.28.x.)

TurboVNC still supports PseudoColor, and the old X code base we used to
use with TurboVNC 1.2.x and prior seems to be happier with PseudoColor
than the modern X.org code bases. As soon as I upgraded our X code base
to Xorg 7.7 (in TurboVNC 2.0), suddenly I started seeing the same Gnome
issues as with TigerVNC.

At any rate, you have a couple of options:

-- TigerVNC 1.3.x still had PseudoColor support and supported PAM as
well-- https://github.com/TigerVNC/tigervnc/releases/tag/v1.3.1

-- If you run into window manager issues, then you can try TurboVNC
1.2.3, since it has an older X code base that is known to work well with
PseudoColor. It does support PAM authentication but not VeNCrypt (you
have to use SSH for encryption.) I provide professional support for
that product.

If Alan C. is reading this, I'd be interested to know if there are any
plans to deprecate PseudoColor visuals in X.org (or maybe that's already
happened and I just didn't know about it.) It's hard to find an
accelerated graphics driver these days that supports them, so I'm
surprised they haven't long since been moved to the "Where Are They
Now?" File.

[Christopher Jacoby]

That's a very thorough answer, and it helps me tremendously. I'll look into the 1.3 versions, and if it doesn't work out I'll give turbo a try.

I'm planning to run pseudocolor with openmotif, which is old enough that I'm optimistic that it will be stable.

Thank you,

Chris

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[Henrique Martins]

> the old X code base we used to use with TurboVNC 1.2.x and
> prior seems to be happier with PseudoColor than the modern
> X.org code bases.

Interesting. I have some quite old programs (written on
HP-UX 8 or 9!) that do animation by manipulating the color
table on a pseudo color display. I tried running them
recently on Xorg and they always fail to open a pseudo color
window.

-- Henrique