Color Scheme Questions

The following questions relate to how you use or change colors on your desktop. See "Chapter 7, Customizing the Desktop Environment" in the Solaris Common Desktop Environment: User's Guide for information on changing color on your desktop. If you find you need further information than is provided in the documentation, check these questions first.

Q. Some of my Motif applications' color schemes look different on the CDE desktop.

Q. How does the color scheme work with OpenWindows applications?

Q. My desktop flashes in different colors when I move the cursor in and out of different windows.

A. (This answer addresses all three questions above that are related to color.) Certain applications may have colormap requirements that prevent them from using the default colormap. If this occurs, these applications will appear with incorrect colors while the rest of the desktop appears normal. Typically, giving such an application the keyboard focus causes it to appear in its correct colors but will cause the rest of the desktop to appear incorrectly. (This phenomenon is commonly referred to as colormap flashing.)

Sometimes an application appears with incorrect colors even if you give it the keyboard focus. This occurs if the application has specified a list of colormaps to be installed. Only the first colormap in this list will be installed, and anything that uses the other colormaps in the list appears with incorrect colors. For these applications, you must use special keys on the keyboard to cycle through the colormaps.

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to tell whether your application has specified a list of colormaps. The only symptom is that the window doesn't appear with its correct colors. If this occurs, you can move the keyboard focus to that window (if it isn't there already) and try these keys to see whether they affect the colormap:

Doing so may end up installing the correct colormap, and it will not affect the other windows on the desktop in any way.

During startup, dtsession will set *foreground, *background and other OpenWindows global color resources so that OpenWindows applications will be in the same color scheme as Solaris CDE applications. You can still control the appearance of their applications by setting application-specific resources. Or, change the palette in Style Manager and restart the OpenWindows application.

Be sure you know what you are changing on the desktop as certain color combinations may not give you the best results. For more information see ColorUse, dynamicColor, foregroundColor, shadowPixmaps resources, and the Color Server section in the dtsession(1) or dtstyle(1) man pages located in /usr/dt/man/man1.