On Sat, Feb 21, 2026 at 04:33:24PM +0100, dan wrote:
> I still have to try the xephyr command sequence you prop
> but I just permit to dubt about your "hardware dependency
> sophistication" as I find that a device retro compatibity to gray
> scale is usually certain, then if it is a software driver limitiation
> could be an other pair of shoes.. Sorry to underline this
> maybe useless point to a solution.
The example with Xephyr was to demonstrate that there is no underlying issue
with current Xenocara versions working in greyscale visuals.
But as I said, the ability to do that depends on the underlying graphics
_driver_.
Anyone with a working X11 setup on OpenBSD can test this using Xephyr and that
was the point of the example. It's independent of the underlying hardware.
There might also be other ways to achieve what the OP wanted to do (*), (run
X11 in greyscale). Hardware backed grayscale mode would be the 'traditional'
way and also has the advantage of using less video memory.
(So back in the days of 512 Mb SVGA cards, for example, you could get a higher
maximum resolution and better performance by using 8-bit instead of, say,
16-bit or 24-bit RGB, but critically by configuring it as greyscale instead
of palettised colour, from a practical point of view it was closer to using a
truecolour display.)
(*) Visually, a nicer approach might be to desaturate the colours by, say,
90%, but not have it as actual greyscale. That way you effectively have
the 'calming' effect of greyscale, (which seems to be what the OP wanted),
but without losing all colour information and collapsing similar colours
to the same grey level, thereby making them indistinguishable.
We published a write-up about implementing a night-mode on the console back
in 2022, by the way.
