porting from SGIs to Linux?

[Owen Taylor]

On Sun, 2005-01-09 at 12:09 -0800, Peter Bismuti wrote:

> I'd like to port some applications from SGIs which use a Motif/ViewKit
> UI to Linux machines running RedHat.
> 
> These applications rely on pseudo-colors.   My first question is: is
> there a simple way of doing this?  Is there some last simple function
> that can be applied to the final pixmap that can alter the colors of
> the drawing?

I don't particularly understand the question. If you are using 
pseudo-color to recolorize images dynamically, computers have been
fast enough to do this by simply rewriting the image with the
new colors for a decade or so. (Remote display is going to be 
more of an issue, if you need that.)

> The opinion has been expressed that PC hardware will continue to not
> support psuedo-colors, and to abandon psuedo-colors all together.
> Perhaps the performs penalty will ultimately be a motivation on the
> long term?  However  some applications may not even be alive before
> that happens.  Is there a temporary solution?

Various cards support 24/8 combinations where normal apps run in
truecolor mode, and legacy apps get a pseudo-color visual. The
mga (for Matrox G400, and similar) Xorg driver is one that I know of. 
You probably can find those cards around cheap used.

> So my second question is, I've heard that the new X.org release offers
> software support for pseudo-colors?  

Not that I've heard of. Some of the recent changes would make it
easier to implement, if someone was interested in doing so, but
there's not a whole lot of interest in pseudo-color in the X development
community these days.

> Could this be used to at least display on a Linux machine while these
> apps while running on an SGI? If so, how can the issue of the
> Motif/ViewKit code be handled?  There no longer seems to be 
> a free version.  Just pay for the commercial version?  Port everything
> supported by Mesa, i.e. LessTiff?  This is a lot of work I'd prefer
> not to have to do.

Motif isn't a problem ... OpenMotif ships with current version 
of RHEL and Fedora. So, LessTif doesn't really give you anything.
Viewkit, you'd presumably have to obtain commercially if you
don't want to port to a different toolkit. 

(How is Mesa involved? It's an implementation of the OpenGL API?)

Regards,
						Owen

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