[GRASSLIST:8643] Re: Eureka! [was Re: Re: NVIZ not working properly in GRASS 6?]

[Tom Russo]

On Fri, Oct 14, 2005 at 02:18:46PM -0700, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <rbeyer at arc.nasa.gov> flavor, containing:
> Tom,
> 
> > > Might be something quick to try.  I'm really curious if it helps, as
> > > it'll light a fire under me to upgrade that laptop's system.
> >
> > It is indeed quick to try, and solved my problem.  Maybe it'll solve yours.
> 
> I'm glad for the pointers, but it didn't work for me.

Sorry that it wasn't a silver bullet.

> I set everything up in my xorg.conf file for my ATI FireGL card,
> however glxinfo displayed "direct rendering: No" and close inspection
> of /var/log/Xorg.0.log shows this:
> 
> (WW) RADEON(0): Direct rendering not yet supported on Radeon 9500 and newer 
> card
> s

Bleah.

> Okay, I also have this Radeon 9200 card that I can try out.  Despite
> the fact that the /var/log/Xorg.0.log file shows
> 
> (II) RADEON(0): Direct rendering enabled
> 
> glxinfo still says "direct rendering: No".

The troubleshooting page at 
http://people.freebsd.org/~anholt/dri/troubleshooting.html 
suggests that the Radeon 9200 isn't supported either.  Perhaps that's out of
date since you don't get the (WW) message --- you might be able to track
down how to get it working if you look on that troubleshooting page.

> In both cases, NVIZ displayed the same graphics buffer junk in its
> visualization window, so I continue to be out of luck.  I think
> that your question about why NVIZ needs direct rendering is a valid
> one, and maybe someone can answer that.  However, short of a
> GRASS-centric solution, it seems I need to go out and find a way
> to get direct rendering working for NVIZ to work.

Yes, I think there has to be a better way to approach this --- something
has changed in how NVIZ uses GL although I really don't know when.  I saw this 
break between 5.0.1 and 5.0.3, heal in 5.1, and sometime in the last year or 
so break again in 6.x.  Finally working out DRM has fixed it for my laptop, 
and not using Mesa GL on the NVIDIA-based machines has fixed it there, but 
clearly there is something fishy going on that should be tracked down.

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY     SAR502  DM64ux         http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236 AHTB#1 
 "The only thing you can do easily is be wrong, and that's hardly
  worth the effort." -- Norton Juster