On Sun, Jan 19, 2003 at 06:14:21PM +1030, John Steele Scott wrote:
> Links-gui had some bizarre behaviour. When it started up the colours
> on my entire display went weird for a moment, then once it was
> running, the colours would go strange whenever I had my mouse inside
> the links-gui window. If I moved the mouse outside the windows, the
> colours would go back to normal.

This looks like a private colormap. An IPC has an 8-bit color display,
which means only 256 different colors simultaneously displayed. It can
be quite difficult to fit several graphical applications into those 256
colors, so some applications use a private colormap: they have their own
256 colors, but in a different colormap than the rest of the display,
and colormaps are switched whenever the mouse cursor enters or leaves
the display.

I remember that Netscape (3.0) could be told to behave that way, with
the "-install" command-line switch. Its default behaviour was to share
the main colormap with other applications, and if an "xdvi" was ran
afterwards while the netscape was running, the DVI file would not look
good at all (xdvi uses shades of gray to implement anti-aliasing, but,
with netscape running, no colormap entries were free for those shades of
gray -- so xdvi ended up with only black and white, and the result was
ugly).

Maybe there is a command-line or compile-time option to tell links-gui
to use the main colormap (which might not be what you actually want,
given what I have said above about xdvi, but it is worth trying).


> but I'm thinking it could actually be due to general NetBSD on IPC
> instability which I remember reading about some time ago (something to
> do with flushing the cache?).

If this is NetBSD 1.6, look at the kernel boot messages. If there is
"sw flushing" in it, you may have the problem. "hw flushing" is ok.
NetBSD 1.5.x did not trigger the problem.


> Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (GNU/Linux)
> Comment: Messages with missing or bad signatures may have been forged or modified in transit!

That one is quite fun. Since I don't use GnuPG nor Linux, I believe there
is something fishy with the mail configuration of your machine.


	--Thomas Pornin