[Paraview] Setting up Paraview Web on a headless Fedora server with GPU

[Jiří Vyskočil]

Hello,


I'm trying to set up a Paraview Web server on a Fedora 23 machine. The serves is not connected to a 
monitor or a keyboard (I only have access through ssh), but it has a nvidia GPU which I want to use 
for paraview.


I have installed xdm to run the X server, and verified that it is in fact running with the correct 
nvidia drivers (by checking the Xorg.0.log file). The problem is I don't know how to run the 
paraview webserver on the X display when there's no one physically logged in - I can only get to the 
server via ssh. When I log in, and switch to the paraview user, the DISPLAY and XAUTHORITY variables 
are empty.


The webserver itself is running (apache + the python launcher), but when I try to open any of the 
example applications, I get an error like this:


$ ./launch-paraview.sh
2016-05-05 14:54:17,528:INFO:twisted:Site starting on 9000
2016-05-05 14:54:17,528:INFO:twisted:Starting factory <twisted.web.server.Site instance at 
0x7fe20da6a998>
2016-05-05 14:55:09,655:INFO:twisted:"127.0.0.1" - - [05/May/2016:12:55:09 +0000] "POST /paraview/ 
HTTP/1.1" 503 78 "https://vbl-sim.eli-beams.eu/apps/Visualizer/" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Fedora; Linux 
x86_64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/45.0"


$ cat 965318f2-12c0-11e6-a3cb-002590e6af35.txt
2016-05-05 14:55:06+0200 [-] Log opened.
ERROR: In /home/strazce/hax/ParaView-v5.0.0-source/VTK/Rendering/OpenGL/vtkXOpenGLRenderWindow.cxx, 
line 333
vtkXOpenGLRenderWindow (0x3f00be0): bad X server connection. DISPLAY=


Specifying DISPLAY=:0 when running the launcher gives this error:

$ cat e73921bc-12c0-11e6-b002-002590e6af35.txt
2016-05-05 14:57:22+0200 [-] Log opened.
No protocol specified
No protocol specified
No protocol specified
ERROR: In /home/strazce/hax/ParaView-v5.0.0-source/VTK/Rendering/OpenGL/vtkXOpenGLRenderWindow.cxx, 
line 333
vtkXOpenGLRenderWindow (0x4127c10): bad X server connection. DISPLAY=:0. Aborting.



Thanks for any hints,

Jiri



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