Re: Undefined color error

[Pascal Bourguignon]

Ken Keefe <kaje@digitalfamily.org> writes:

> Hello, I recently installed the latest Mandrake Linux distro and emacs
> seems to be broken. Here is what happens when I try to start emacs from
> a terminal:
> 
> $ emacs
> Undefined color: "black"
> 
> And that is all that happens. I have tried reinstalling it, I even
> installed it from the tarball available on gnu.org. Same thing. I am
> guessing that this might be a problem with X or something? I can do
> emacs -nw and it works, but I like the X version. I have completely
> removed my .emacs file, so I don't think it can be that. 

My guess is that it's a X problem too. Check the ~/.Xresources file

You may have lines like:

emacs*Background:                 white
emacs*Foreground:                 black
emacs*pointerColor:               red
emacs*cursorColor:                black

X keeps a dictionnary of color names in files named rgb.txt.  It seems
emacs has a copy in its etc directory too:

/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb.txt
/usr/share/emacs/21.3/etc/rgb.txt
 
These files contains RGB values in decimal followed by the name of the
color:

255 255 250             white
255 250 250             snow
248 248 255             ghost white
248 248 255             GhostWhite
245 245 245             white smoke
245 245 245             WhiteSmoke
...
255   0   0     red
...
  0 255   0     green
...
  0   0 255     blue
...
  0   0   0             black


> Thanks ahead of time for your help. I love emacs!! I feel like I have
> been separated from a brother or something!

-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__