Running under X11, on starting up the environment, or any tool within it, LispWorks may print a message saying that a particular color could not be allocated.
This problem can occur if your X color map is full. If this is the case, LispWorks cannot allocate all the colors that are specified in the X11 resources.
This may happen if you have many different colors on your screen, for instance when displaying a picture in the root window of your display.
Colors are chosen based on the X11 resources. See X11/Motif resources for more information.
To remove the problem, you can then change the resources (for example, by editing the file mentioned in X11/Motif resources) to reduce the number of colors LispWorks allocates.
LispWorks Release Notes and Installation Guide - 23 Dec 2011