[GRASSLIST:4712] Re: NVIZ startup crash

[Glynn Clements]

Rado Bonk wrote:

> I recently experienced a problem of NVIZ startup on computer equiped with
> onboard graphic accelerator (SIS5513). NVIZ doesn't start at all
> complaining about "bot enough memory". Attached is the NVIZ crash output
> and dmesg graphic card related output during the boot process. I'm using
> LRH7.3, and GRASS5.0.

Linux' hardware-accelerated 3D graphics support isn't particularly
reliable, in my experience.

If OpenGL programs such as NVIZ result in system crashes, the simplest
solution is to use software rendering (which, on any modern system, is
fast enough for NVIZ). There are two ways to do this:

1. Force the X server to use software rendering, with:

	LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1
	export LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT

If you add these lines to the file ~/.grass.bashrc, they will be run
whenever you start GRASS.

2. Install the stand-alone Mesa library (www.mesa3d.org), and to force
that to be used instead of the XFree86 OpenGL libraries, by setting
LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the directory containing the Mesa libraries. E.g. 
if Mesa's libGL.so is installed in /usr/local/lib, then:

	LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib
	export LD_LIBRARY_PATH

will force Mesa's libGL.so to be used in preference to the one which
comes with XFree86.

The second approach has the advantage that, if a crash occurs in the
software renderer (which is less common than with hardware rendering,
but still possible), it only crashes the application, and not the X
server.

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn.clements at virgin.net>