I've recently 'upgraded' my Mac Pro to Leopard and in the process have killed a major piece of cross platform software (IDL) that I use in my work. Apparently, Leopard has disabled 256 color compatibility, while simultaneously leaving the option as ghosted teaser on the displays panel of system preferences. They even have a posting on this (answer 306773) that claims this is 'normal'.

Now, I don't actually want to set the global display to 256 colors, but my application works in X11, where I need the individual windows to open with 8-bit color depth. This was never a problem with Tiger (or Windows or Linux). So long as the OS supports 256 colors, the windows open fine under X. As things are now, when I open X in 256 color mode, I get blank white screens on the same machine where they were working fine on before the upgrade!

Does anyone know if this is going to be fixed or if there is a workaround that will enable me to use this program? I can't be the only one with specialized or legacy software that requires 8-bit color support. As it stands now, I'm pretty much frozen out of the Mac OS as a work computer unless I go back to Tiger. I'm in the process of getting a new set of computers for the group I'm in, and, if this isn't fixable, I'm probably going to have cancel my mac orders and switch to PCs instead.

Any ideas out there?

Apple's X11 listserver offering, lists.apple.com Mailing Lists
or the Apple support forums, Apple - Support - Discussions - X11 ...
might be more fruitful.

I recall some folks installing a non-supported patch to X11 and/or reverting to a previous version of X11 than is supplied with Leopard.

There appear to have been bugs reintroduced and some feature "enhancements".

It's not specifically Unix that is having the problem you describe, but appears to be specifically X11 as supplied in the Leopard product.