Is it possible to change color depth in KDE in user mode?

Question

I want to increase the color depth for my user account in kde. I cannot edit the configuration in /etc/X11. Is it possible?

Answer 1

No, it is not possible to change this outside of the xorg.conf configuration. You can look here:

http://www.x.org/archive/current/doc/man/man5/xorg.conf.5.xhtml

If the variables are available for run-time configuration they will say:

"and the value can be changed at run−time with xset(1) ..."

You can see the Depth settings don't have run-time configurations:

DefaultDepth depth

specifies which color depth the server should use by default. The −depth command line option can be used to override this. If neither is specified, the default depth is driver−specific, but in most cases is 8.

DefaultFbBpp bpp

specifies which framebuffer layout to use by default. The −fbbpp command line option can be used to override this. In most cases the driver will chose the best default value for this. The only case where there is even a choice in this value is for depth 24, where some hardware supports both a packed 24 bit framebuffer layout and a sparse 32 bit framebuffer layout.

Answer 2

I've looked into this and although what I found didn't solve my problem, it answered my question. The simple solution is to build a xorg.conf file

Xorg :1 -configure

this produces an xorg.conf.new file. You can then modify it adding

Section "Screen"
    ...
    DefaultDepth 24
    ...
EndSection

Then you place that file in /etc/X11/ or similar

This worked in so far as it made the color depth 24 but it seems my issue was an incorrect driver or something of that sort.