Running X in 8 bit mode I have pallete screwups. This happens in ebuilds 4.2.0-r6 and 4.2.0-r5 on (at least) two different computers. One running the nvidia drivers, the other the trident driver. I experience the problems using windowmaker, black box , and wine running starcraft (but probably that won't be the only troublemaker). I suspect this problem is caused by the ebuild or by X (which I seriously doubt)
The patches we apply are: -i18n fix -libGLU (extern) fix -truetype fixes -one line xft patch So unless you can track it down to some obscure bug related to gcc, compiler opts, etc I strongly suspect its either a configuration error or XFree86 upstream issue..
I suspect indeed it is an upstream xfree bug. My compile options are "-O2 -march=i686 -mcpu=i686", so nothing that obscure. The patches mentioned don't seem to do anything with the palette, where the problem surely must be. (All programs use a lot of colors). Maybe someone could try to replicate the problem (just run X with windowmaker as displaymanager and 256 colors).
I have run X recently at -depth 8 with fluxbox. The colors aren't dithered the way I would expect them to be on the fluxbox bar. The bar shows up in simple black whereas it should be a dithered gradient, I would hope. The second issue I have with 8-bit X, I am unable to run starcraft in winex. The pointer disappears and everything hangs. If I kill the wine process from a tty, I see errors about it being unable to start glx. I use the nvidia drivers. Happily, 16-bit seems to work quite nicely for fluxbox and a little terran ultra-violence :) This doesn't strike me as a Gentoo-specific type issue either, just throwing in my experiences.
I have reason to believe this behaviour can be followed back to the xrender extension. I somewhere read something about it "eating" colors.
wine says 'if you dont run in 16-bit color and something breaks, then its your fault we dont want to hear about it'
I think this bug should be closed WONTFIX as it is a problem with XFree
Closing the bug