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I am trying to run ParaView through Xvfb in a Ubuntu instance on Amazon EC2. I have installed X11/Xvfb related packages as per http://mike.ucoz.com/publ/programming/ubuntu/selenium_ubuntu_amazon_ec2_headless/8-1-0-4

But I can't seem to get past an error associated with the swrast library.

Here are the message when starting Xfvb

$ export DISPLAY=:99
$ Xvfb $DISPLAY &
Initializing built-in extension Generic Event Extension
Initializing built-in extension SHAPE
Initializing built-in extension MIT-SHM
Initializing built-in extension XInputExtension
Initializing built-in extension XTEST
Initializing built-in extension BIG-REQUESTS
Initializing built-in extension SYNC
Initializing built-in extension XKEYBOARD
Initializing built-in extension XC-MISC
Initializing built-in extension SECURITY
Initializing built-in extension XINERAMA
Initializing built-in extension XFIXES
Initializing built-in extension RENDER
Initializing built-in extension RANDR
Initializing built-in extension COMPOSITE
Initializing built-in extension DAMAGE
Initializing built-in extension MIT-SCREEN-SAVER
Initializing built-in extension DOUBLE-BUFFER
Initializing built-in extension RECORD
Initializing built-in extension DPMS
Initializing built-in extension X-Resource
Initializing built-in extension XVideo
Initializing built-in extension XVideo-MotionCompensation
Initializing built-in extension SELinux
Initializing built-in extension GLX
[dix] Could not init font path element /var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/TrueType, removing from list!

I could not see anything dramatic above. But when running glxinfo

$ glxinfo
name of display: :99
libGL: OpenDriver: trying /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/tls/swrast_dri.so
libGL: OpenDriver: trying /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/swrast_dri.so
libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast
Error: couldn't find RGB GLX visual or fbconfig

144 GLXFBConfigs:
    visual  x   bf lv rg d st  colorbuffer  sr ax dp st accumbuffer  ms  cav

Note:

$ ls /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/
dummy_drv_video.so  nouveau_dri.so        r300_dri.so    radeonsi_dri.so
i915_dri.so         nouveau_vieux_dri.so  r600_dri.so    swrast_dri.so
i965_dri.so         r200_dri.so           radeon_dri.so  vmwgfx_dri.so

Thanks in advance.

Julien
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  • There is no video device available on most EC2 instances. The GPU instances may work, but they are based on the Nvidia Tesla cards (designed for CUDA processing) – datasage Sep 23 '13 at 03:18
  • There is no video device indeed. I am trying to use ParaView in a batch mode (pvbatch) to generate pictures automatically. I was under the impression that using Xvfb would allow this to happens. – Julien Sep 23 '13 at 06:10
  • When I run pvbatch, pvbatch fails with the same error message as glxinfo. – Julien Sep 23 '13 at 06:11
  • Do you think that recompiling ParaView with OSMesa as per http://www.paraview.org/Wiki/Setting_up_a_ParaView_Server could go around the issue? Anyone has done this before? – Julien Sep 24 '13 at 01:46
  • Your problem seems different since on my system glxinfo yields no error. But [this answer](http://stackoverflow.com/a/29053931/3565696) might give a hint. – ederag Mar 14 '15 at 20:49

2 Answers2

1

Assuming that you have xvfb-run installed, you can try with:

xvfb-run --auto-servernum -s "-screen 0 640x480x24" <something_that_needs_X11>

Source: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=904851#c5

eang
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0

Amazon EC2 uses Nvidia GPU, so the problem may caused by NV driver.

Just give it a try, run it with docker container, based on my dockerfile Dockerfile_cuda80

This dockerfile is based on official cuda image, modified to run all cuda samples with OpenGL, you should use nvidia-docker to build & run it.

This solves my similar problem while running windows program via WINE.

Martin Evans
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allenyllee
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