Wanted: some HP 9000/3xx bits

der Mouse wrote: Heh. Well from what I can recall it involved bringing up an older workstation and trying to display an xterm from a then-current PC running either Solaris x86 or Linux, with a "desktop environment" installed and running on said PC. It looked like the clients on the newer box wanted specific visuals that this server wasn't able to provide, hence my comments about current distributions. But hey, if I can't reproduce it or describe it in enough detail that somebody else could, it never officially happened... I certainly had no problem using X with those and other clients on 1bpp, 4bpp, and 8bpp VAXstations back in the late 80s and early to mid 90s. Not to mention Sun-3's and -4's, DECstations, Sony NEWS, early AViiONs, and other gear. This was using X Consortium releases whenever possible; for example, I could never find a server other than the one DG supplied for the AViiONs. Re-reading my note, I see that I have "spoken" imprecisely. I didn't mean to imply that X itself can't handle low-bpp displays due to some intrinsic limitation, especially given I first encountered X on monochrome VAXstation 2000s! Rather it appeared to be a problem with the common clients (or perhaps libraries) in the same way that different apps over the years showed up that were coded to only deal with certain color-depth visuals and failed badly when they couldn't get them. I have next to no information on the workings of the 98549A framebuffer. For all I know it uses two of those planes for overlay and something else and only provides 4bpp. Perhaps eventually I'll find out... --S.