Re: undefined color: black

[Stefan Monnier]

> I'm unable to start Emacs on a Fedora Core 5 x86_64 install running with
> the rpm.livna.net Nvidia driver.  I get 'underfined color: black' and
> similar messages about undefined colors if I try xemacs.  'emacs -nw'
> works fine.  Has anybody seen this problem?  If so, do you know how to
> fix it?

By "xemacs", do you really mean XEmacs or just Emacs but in X11-mode?
Assuming it's the latter, I've never seen such a problem, but in some
pre-release version of Emacs I bumped into a problem that looked similar,
where the black color would be hijacked (rather than undefined).

This was on an 8bit display (max 256 different colors) and was due to Emacs
never releasing colors while it continuously re-allocated the same colors,
so if you kept it running long enough the ref-count on the often used colors
(e.g. black) would wrap around the 2G limit and so it would erroneously find
itself "free" for re-allocation.

Now what you're seeing is not this bug: the wrap-around has been fixed since
in the X11 server, and the failure to deallocate colors was also fixed in
Emacs before the 21.1 release.

But maybe it's a similar bug somewhere.  Probably not, but I felt like
telling my story anyway ;-)


        Stefan