VNC viewer problem with undefined colors (FIXED)

[diehl]

I have a problem wth VNC under Mandriva 2007. If I try to run emacs from a terminal in a VNC session I get the error "Undefined color: black" and emacs fails to open in a new window and run. I can, however, run emacs in console mode (i.e. "emacs -nw"). I've gotten similar "Undefined color" for some other X-windows programs when run from within a VNC session. I do not get these errors when running the same programs on the same computer directly from X windows. I have no idea what "undefined colors" emacs is complaining about. Earlier versions of VNC on Mandriva did not have this strange behavior.

 

So the problem is some something to do with X windows running in a VNC session. Some sort of "colors" are not defined. I should note that the VNC session looks normal - there is no obvious problem with colors, per se, only colors that X wants to use when opening a new window for an application. Also I should mention that many X apps run fine in VNC, such as Firefox.

Edited November 14, 2006 by diehl

[diehl]

I posted a message to the tight-vnc email list and got a response to that VNC must not be able to find the file which defines colors. I looked in my VNC log file in~/.vnc. The first line was:

Couldn't open RGB_DB '/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb'

 

Poking around I saw that on Mandriva 2007 /usr/X11R6/lib/X11 was a symbolic link to /usr/lib/X11 and that there were no files called "rgb" to be found in that directory tree.

 

I then saw that I had an rpm installed called rgb-1.0.1-2mdv2007.0 which included a file /usr/share/X11/rgb.txt which looked like the file VNC wants. In has lines like (which look like color definitions to me):

 

255 250 250 snow

248 248 255 ghost white

248 248 255 GhostWhite

 

So I made a symbolic link which fixed the VNC color problem:

 

ln -s /usr/share/X11/rgb.txt /usr/lib/X11/rgb.txt

 

I will send a bug report to Mandriva.

Edited November 14, 2006 by diehl