20010730: gempak error running in 24-bit

>From: Wayne Bresky <address@hidden>
>Organization: Cornell
>Keywords: 200107301341.f6UDfV121470 Linux X GEMPAK McIDAS

Wayne,

Steve Chiswell is currently hosting the GEMPAK training workshop here
in Boulder.  You may have to wait for his authoritative answer
on the gempak questions.

>So you can only run Gempak with 8-bit color?  I was not aware of this.

This is correct.

>So what do you do if you want to run Gempak and McIDAS on the same
>machine?

In Linux, you can run two X servers at one time and hot key between them.

>I have encountered problems running McIDAS using KDE
>(no image window displayed), so I switched to Gnome for that user.

Right.

>But if I also want to run Gempak on the same machine I have to configure
>my display to use 8-bit color.  Now when I run McIDAS I get a message
>informing me that I should run with fewer colors.

Right.

>Gnome is, as you say,
>eating up all the available colors.  Is there any solution?

The only thing I can offer you right now (until I can figure out the
reason that McIDAS fails under KDE) is the running of two X servers.

Here is the note from a user telling us about how he worked around the
8/24 bit color problems:

  Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2001 15:52:12 -0700
  From: Mike Leuthold <address@hidden>
  
  Chiz,
          I don't know if anyone has come up with this yet, but I've come up
  with a work around for the 'not enough colors' problem and am able to have
  a 24 bit display and a 8 bit display.  Redhat Linux supports 2 separate X
  server processes.  I've set my default (:0) server to 24 bit and set the
  secondary to 8 bit (:1).  What I did, was run X :1 -depth 8, fire up a
  xterminal on that screen, and a window manager (twm).  Linux supports
  toggling between them via the ctrl-alt-F7 and F8 keys.  I run ntl -s 140
  on the :1 screen and just toggle back and forth.  It works well. You need
  quite a bit of memory though (I'm running 512MB) but that is no big deal
  on a PC.  The hardware is a 1.33GHz Athlon and a Geforce2 video card.  
  This Athlon is incredibly fast running garp, by the way.  Steve Mullen and
  I plan on getting all Linux machines to replace our xterminals in the near
  future.

So, you would run McIDAS in the 24-bit server and GEMPAK in the 8-bit
server.

>Thanks for your help.

I hope that this gets you going.  Again, Chiz will be totally occupied
by the workshop until Thursday.

Tom
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