ArcView GIS 3.1 color map problems

[Brian Willis]

We use ArcView for some mapping of data. There is a section of this that assigns color to a value of a data type and draws a display of your data on the map using the color assigned. For some reason when I bring the display back to Cygwin in XP/2000 or back to Linux workstation, the colors on the map do not correspond with any of the colors that have been assigned to the map. It works fine when I bring the display back to another HP. I'm not seeing any errors from the console I start the software on. This is an old version of the software and it may just not work correctly with modern color maps. I've heard that it could be related to pseudocolor but I'm unsure how to even diagnose this as I'm not getting any errors.

[Ermin Borovac · Accepted solution]

I guess that X server on HP box uses PseudoColor visual, whereas Linux and Cygwin use TrueColor visual.

You can verify this with xdpyinfo. Set your DISPLAY to each X server system in turn to check.

$ xdpyinfo -display $DISPLAY

Look for line that says

default screen number: 0

Then in section screen #0 (where 0 is number of the default screen) look for default visual id.

default visual id: 0x21

Further down you will see all possible visual s that X server can display.

visual:
visual id: 0x21
class: TrueColor
depth: 24 planes

This server is running TrueColor visual and I'm guessing that the case with Linux and Cygwin X servers.

One possible solution for your app that requires PseudoColor visual is to run VNC server.

If you are not familiar with VNC more information can be found here

http://www.realvnc.com/

With this suggestion you would run VNC server using PseudoColor visual on the server where you run the application. Remote clients (Linux, Windows XP etc) would use vncviewer to connect to your server to display the application.

$ vncserver :1 -depth 8 -cc 3

[Brian Willis]

PseudoColor was the problem. I had to put cygwin into fullscreen mode so it could be 8 bit color. Once I did that the xserver reported that it was using PseudoColor. I was then able to run the app fine. I didn't want to use vnc because it's only for this one app. I didn't need to add another access method and service to have to worry about being secure. Thanks for the suggestion though. The answer did put me on the right track though. Thanks.

[TwoProc]

FWIW - Reflections X has good pseudocolor support, even when not in full screen mode. However, it's not as attractrively priced as Cygwin, to say the least.

[Brian Willis]

We were running Exceed before for X11 support. We have since started moving to Cygwin for the cost reasons. Can't really beat the price of free. Thanks for the help!