Today I decided to updgrade my Ubuntu 5.04 System (Breezy) to the latest version, i.e. Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake). After some 764Mb of new packages, some (un-happy) removals, some installations, and some error saying that the upgrade process has been stopped due to an unforeseen error (huh!), I could manually reboot my system into its new version!

I’m a big supporter of FVWM, and use it daily instead of Gnome, which I find too slow, as I use aTerm for the same reason and conky for monitoring my system. How big was my surprise too see just after logging in a pink conky, black on black window titles, and aterm refusing to start due to some color error.

After some debugging, here is what I found out:

When starting aterm, I got this error:

aterm: can't load color black

followed by identical output for a bunch of various colors. I suspected the same happens with conky and FVWM, which cannot extrapolate HEX colors from these color names.

The solution was to modify the line in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file which define the path to the rgb color file (rgb.txt). After the upgrade, it has simply moved from some /usr/X11.../lib/... location to /etc/X11/rgb.txt.

Simply putting

RgbPath ="/etc/X11/rgb"

in the Xorg config file did the trick (don’t type the .txt!!!).