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Why are colors different in X-Win32 8 versus X-Win32 7.1 and earlier

X-Win32 8 introduces a new feature to tell remote UNIX, Linux, and BSD hosts (such as Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian, SuSE, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, and FreeBSD) that X-Win32 is an X Server that supports color for X Client resource data. Oddly enough, this is entirely independent of X-Win32’s ability to display colors and instead is a side effect of the way that X Client resource data is interpreted on the remote host. On the remote host, there are two different sets of colors defined, one for when the X Server advertises that it supports colors in resources and the other for when the X Server does not advertise this. When you login to the console of the machine (e.g. into a Gnome, CDE, or KDE session), the remote host pulls data from the color section of the X Client resource data. However, when you login remotely with X-Win32 7.1 and earlier the remote host pulls data from the black and white section of the X Client resource data.

In X-Win32 8 we added a feature, which is on by default, that tells the remote host to pull data from the color section of the X Client resource data. This causes applications like xcalc to look much nicer in X-Win32 8 than they did in X-Win32 7.1. However, we have discovered that some UNIX and Linux distributions have bad values in their color X Client resource data; for example, Debian sets the man page bold text color to the same color as the background (e.g. black on black or white on white), making text that should be bold instead be invisible. In addition, if you have customized your X Client resource data with an .Xresources or .Xdefaults data then you need to be aware that some applications, such as emacs, completely ignore those settings if a resource database has already been initialized; this new feature in X-Win32 8 initializes the resource database, thus it can cause emacs to lose its previous customizations.

The vast majority of our users benefit from the improved colors that they see by default with this feature enabled, so this feature is on by default. However, you can easily turn it off to return to the colors that you are used to or to avoid a problem with the color resource data on your remote machine.

Instructions to Turn Off the Feature that Uses Remotely Defined Colors

  1. Open X-Config’s Window form
  2. Select Multiple Window if it is not selected already
  3. Uncheck the box labeled Set Xresource defaults
  1. Press Apply, then restart X-Win32 and the colors will be as they were in previous versions of X-Win32

    X-Win32 8 Showing xcalc with Remotely Defined Colors

    xwin32-8-xcalc-200.png

    X-Win32 7.1 Showing xcalc in Black and White

    xwin32-71-xcalc-200.png

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