X works just fine with 8-bit color. Things in the background just use the unused colors instead of the colors it should. I used to help this by limiting my window manager settings to only a couple shades of grey. I wouldn't say they are unusable. Have you set one up to see how it looks? I had KDE running on one of my sparcs (with 8bit color) and it looked fine.
Dusty > The way I understand it, we have tons of Sun boxes, but they are > unusable as thin clients because they are only 8bit graphics.
