Images have a fubar color palette when generated under Xvfb instead of normal X.

Question

When generating a png image file in Mathematica on a linux box running X, there's no problem. Doing the same on a linux machine without X but instead Xvfb the png generates fine but the colors are all screwed up. We tried changing the pixel depth from the default of 8, to no avail. Any other tweaks that might make Xvfb mimic normal X better, or is this more likely a Mathematica bug?

I actually suspect this has nothing to do with Mathematica. I'm finding other accounts on the web of people having trouble generating reasonable quality jpegs in OpenOffice under Xvfb. I've seen recommendations to use VNC instead of Xvfb. Is that likely to solve this problem?

Here's how the image looks when generated on the machine with X11:

http://yootles.com/outbox/dmass-x.png

And here's how it looks generated on the machine with Xvfb:

http://yootles.com/outbox/dmass-xvfb.png

Answer 1

Did you try with a pixel depth of 24?