I can't change xterm's colors (with Xresources)
 

I am trying to set custom colors in Xterm via the file ~/.Xresources but Xterm doesn't respond. Here is what Xresources contains:

Xterm responds only to those two:

How can I set my Xterm colors?

I don't mind if it's going to be another way than editing Xresources. If Xterm cannot change colors, I am open to suggestions on another terminal that will allow me to do so (along with changing the font to something smooth like DejaVu Sans Mono).

It should work fine, that's how my xterm settings are loaded too. And the lines starting with ! ought to be comments, so those definitely shouldn't be responded to. Did you remember to run xrdb to refresh the changes? Otherwise changes will be visible only when restarting X.(I think that's the right command).

These two options do work:

In my first post, I mistakenly left the "!" in (which are comments of course). I do run xrdb -merge ~/.Xdefaults after each change I do. I tried it again but this time I restarted X. Nothing changed.

I tried out setting colors in Hex instead of RGB but again it didn't worked (note that these are random colors, I just created them with Gcolor2 to test whether Xterm will respond):

Does it work on your Slackware 12.1 x86? Can you paste me here your color configuration, perhaps I messed up these colors somewhere.

If it's working on your system then maybe I messed some other configuration file? I don't know...

Mine's Slackware too, but not x86. I appended your configs to my file, it works fine in my machine. See a snapshot.
Couple of things: you might want to symlink .Xdefaults and .Xresources just to be sure. Also, I've defined those lines as XTerm*color0 instead of xterm*color0, but your way works for me too.
I've uploaded my .Xdefaults here, in case it helps.

Maybe there are overriden by something in app-defaults ?

locate app-defaults
Should be in /etc/X11/app-defaults/Xterm

maybe you have an empty space at the end of each line? I remember that Xresources is sensitive to that. "#76A67F" is fine, but "#76A67F " is not.

Do you have an IBM System Z?! :-P Just kidding. But out of curiocity, what are you running Slackware on?

Thanks for the screenshot, I never doubted that it worked for you though! :-D Is this fvwm2? Nice theme!

I symlinked .Xdefaults to .Xresources. Nothing changed. Then I removed .Xresources and kept just .Xdefaults. Again, nothing. I tried your Xdefaults (exactly as you have it on pastebin) but again, no change.

Hm.. I thought that the options in home override any of these defaults. Nevertheless, I tried moving the whole /etc/X11/app-defaults directory to /tmp and then restarted X, but nothing happened.

I checked that one too, but there is no empty space there. I was curious, so I tried this: I placed an empty espace in "xterm*background: black " (which is one of the options that work on me) and it still worked. Does it disable the color/option if you put a space there on your machine?

It would be nice if someone with x86 Slackware could confirm that the colors of Xterm can be changed (you can test any of the configurations that me or the rest posted in this topic).

By x86 do you mean x86-64? That's the conclusion I jumped to and I now see x86 also refers to normal i[3-6]86 families. My slackware runs on a 32 bit Pentium dual core. The WM is Ion3 (see my sig!)
I've kinda run out of ideas here. You could make a deliberate typo in your .Xdefaults, and see whether or not xrdb actually parses the file when you run the merge command. I usually get warnings like 'unterminated single quote'.

It does work for the color but gives warnings:
For the font it does not work:

Try using 'gray99' as the color -I thinkl that was what it was when I ran into this problem with some other program.

I did. Erm.. Ion3 looks a bit too "hack-ish" for me, and I yearn for the lazyness of Xfce :P

I tried making a deliberate mistake on Xresources and xrdb found it.

I tried putting all colors (except background and foreground) as grey99, like this:

But it didn't worked.

Then I found some color codes for xterm and tried again the same with PapayaWhip, like this:

It didn't worked either.

I think I am doing something wrong on my side because also tried a few Xresources from the ones that we posted on this topic on Slax 6.0.3 (a LiveCD) and Xubuntu 7.10 (running as LiveCD) and again it didn't worked! (always running xrdb of course).

This... can't be. Not working on 3 different distributions (although Slax is based on Slackware). I am going to download and try it on Knoppix, Fedora liveCD and then FreeSBIE. I will post the results.

In any case, thanks a lot guys! :)

Well, in Slackware it's call from /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc

Something wrong with your HOME env var?
File perms?
Starting X in an unusual way?

Just some thoughts.

ls -lh ~/.Xresources gives me:

This one looks ok.

I had this curstom alias to start X in 96 DPI:

I removed it from /etc/profile.d/coreutils-dircolors.sh, loged out, then loged in again and started X. No change. Is this what you mean with "unusual way"?

My HOME env var seems ok:

Have you tried to query the X resources db to see if your entries made it in?

xrdb -query | grep XTerm

Since it's not very lengthy, here is my whole xrdb -query:

When I read your post, I changed back from "xterm*color..." to "XTerm*color..." just in case it made any difference. I guess this is why we see both the "xterm" entries and the "XTerm" entries. I have set all the colors to "PapayaWhip" so that it will become obvious when it starts working.