[Paraview] pvserver --use-offscreen-rendering

[Robert Mueller]

Hi all,
I want to visualize simple 3d voxel data: creating iso surfaces, slices etc... 
First interactive and later in batch mode.
As the data sets tend to get quite large (up to 1000x1000x1000 voxels) I 
probably have to use some parallel computation. pvserver/pvbatch seem the 
right tools for this, but the computing nodes don't have graphic cards I can 
use. So I tried compiling pvserver with osmesa and using 
the --use-offscreen-rendering switch. I tried some combinations of paraview 
version/mesa-lib with and without mpi. It's always the same:
Stand alone paraview can open the (small) test files und display everything I 
want. When using the client/server mode, the server crashes at the point when 
more than a simple outline of the data has to be displayed.

Can somebody give instructions how to get a working pvserver fpr use without 
without graphics hardware (versions, linux distribution, compiler version)? 
Maybe I could build this system in virtual machine, just to have a valid 
starting point.
I'm using ubuntu, amd64, 7.10 

thank you
Robert Mueller