Re: GS Back xlib on 8Bit display

[Sebastian Reitenbach]

Riccardo Mottola <riccardo.mottola@libero.it> wrote: 
> Hi,
> 
> Sebastian Reitenbach wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I got GNUstep up and running on a Tadpole Sparcbook 3GX under OpenBSD ;)
> > Riccardo recommended me to use the xlib graphics backend.
> >
> > Generally it seems to be all fine, besides a little bit slow. Since its only
8
> > Bit display, colors sometimes look a bit weirdo ;)
> Yes.. well I think display is a bit slow. Before moving and before we 
> lost solaris 2.6 support, I tinkered quite a lot with my sparc boxen and 
> even on the SMP computer GNUstep felt slow.
> A bit the display is slow. 8 bit support used to be unusable, the 
> improved a little, but it still doesn't dither well. NeXT had excellent 
> 8 bit support. Also OpenStep for solaris did run quite well on 
> SparcStations. I guess PostScript did a lot of the work as well as 
> carefully designed icons and artwork.
> 
> Have you tried ART, just for fun?

not yet, still on my TODO list ;)

> >
> > When applications are starting, I see the following warning on the console:
> >
> > WARNING - XGServer is unable to use the fast algorithm for writing to an
8-bit
> > display on this host - the most likely reason being the StandardColormap
> > RGB_BEST_MAP has not been installed.
> >
> > My hope is when I can get rid of the warning, then colors may look a bit
better,
> > and maybe if it then uses the "fast algorithm" things may feel faster on
that
> > box.
> >
> > Googling for the RGB_BEST_MAP, I found its related to xlib, but what
exactly,
> > and how to install it, its not clear to me.
> > I hope someone has a cluestick and can point me into the right direction.
> >
> I don't, but if we get one we might want try to improve xlib, but it 
> could prove hard.

If no one comes up with a cluestick, then there is probably only one option:
reading the xlib documentation ;)
And where is the fun, when everything is just easy ;)

> 
> Another reason of slowness is the limited amount of RAM: we got quite 
> "fat" lately. My iBook, which has a 300MHz G3, L2 cache and 160MB of RAM 
> and an ATI video card is definitely much more powerful than your 
> Sparcbook. However, it is slow in usage, compared to my other iBook 
> which runs Mac 10.3.9. We are a bit slow in startup, consume RAM. That 
> is a bit the same problem i have with the MIPS netbook (Letux 400)  Even 
> a base system with Terminal + Ink gets past the 64MB range, with 
> GWorkspace running 128MB are little. I don't know how much it is 
> GNUstep's fault, X11's fault and generally the OS that got more bloated 
> in time.

Yep, the sparcbook came initially with 32MB RAM. Yesterday I found that starting
one GNUstep App, i.e. AddressManager, it already started swapping :(
So I found the right RAM modules on EBay yesterday and I had much luck and got
them already delivered Today, therefore now I have 64MB in it.

> 
> Try the following: use LaternaMagica and load a fairly big image, 
> several megapixels. It will consume quite some memory, but the X server 
> will use up even more. LaternaMagica doesn't have optimizations in this 
> regard (it loads the whole thing) but used on Mac I can handle the same 
> images easily. a 30MPixel will kill my Laptop with 1G of ram because of 
> memory exhaustion (I have seen 500Mbytes+ allocated to Xorg).

I may try that and see. 

thanks,
Sebastian

> 
> If we have some kind of inefficiency there and see that GNUstep uses a 
> lot of images...
> 
> 
> Riccardo
>