aterm whacked?

[Luke Dean]

On Sat, 12 Jul 2008, Neil Short wrote:

> I just mem-wiped my laptop and am in the process of installing 
> everything after.
>
> I have several issues (linux-firefox with linux-flash plugin crashes on 
> sites with flash), not the least of which is aterm doesn't seem to 
> behave very well.
>
> When I run aterm I get:
>
> $ aterm
> aterm has encountered the following problem interacting with X Windows :
>      Request: 64,    Error: 8(BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes))
>      in resource: 0x140000D
> aterm has encountered the following problem interacting with X Windows :
>      Request: 64,    Error: 8(BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes))
>      in resource: 0x140000D
> aterm has encountered the following problem interacting with X Windows :
>      Request: 64,    Error: 8(BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes))
>      in resource: 0x140000D
>
> .... etc.
>
> Transparency doesn't work right either - which I see is the greatest 
> attraction to aterm.
>
> Any ideas?

I had this problem with an old Sony Vaio about a year ago.
Xorg detected that the correct video driver to use was "neomagic".
Whatever automatic configuration method I was using at the time decided 
that I should be running with 32-bit color depth in xorg.conf.
It turns out that the neomagic driver doesn't support color depth greater 
than 24-bits...

This misconfiguration worked well enough until something like aterm tried 
to use transparency, then it would complain about the "BadMatch", 
referring to the color depth that the driver supported versus the color 
depth that X was configured for, presumably.

I found two solutions.  One was to edit the "Screen" section of xorg.conf 
to remove the entry with DefaultDepth 32.  The other was to edit xorg.conf 
to use the vesa driver instead of the neomagic driver.