my problem was poor coding on the part of previous author.
they were using X11 libraries and had an if statement based around
if DefaultVisual(display, screen)->class == PseudoColor
well that call to DefaultVisual class returns a value of TrueColor on my system.
those values can be found in /usr/include/X11/X.h and here's what mine say in SLES 11.3 x86-64:
Code:
/* Display classes used in opening the connection
* Note that the statically allocated ones are even numbered and the
* dynamically changeable ones are odd numbered */
#define StaticGray 0
#define GrayScale 1
#define StaticColor 2
#define PseudoColor 3
#define TrueColor 4
#define DirectColor 5
tags: PseudoColor TrueColor DirectColor StaticColor GrayScale StaticGray
i was worried it was a security thing in SLES, particularly under security center and hardening about disabling or enabling a remote access to the X server. it was not. once i waded through the code which was multiple files and one file was very large, i found out the source of the problem. all i had to do was change PseudoColor to TrueColor in my if statement and that fixed everything.
i was also smart enough to put some error checking in for future reference when it bombs.
