[vtkusers] MangledMesa & VTK

[Randall Hand]

Well.. Correct me if I'm wrong (/crossfingers hoping i'm wrong) but I'm
trying to get VTk running on systems with no video displays, no hardware
acceleration, and no running x-server.  From what I've experienced in the
past (albeit all this testing was back in the 4.4 days), the only way to get
that was with Mangled Mesa.  Mesa would get visualizations working without
hardware acceleration, but still insisted on popping up windows (if you had
X running) to do so.

If I could get my visualizations working (which are all single-frame, render
to PNG type stuff) without mangled mesa I'ld be happy.  But, in my
experience, there's no way to get it working in all three cases in a
completely "invisible" (meaning no visible display) way.
  1) Workstation with GPU card & X running, and you're on the display
  2) Remote system with no GPU card and X not running
  3) Remote system with GPU & X, but you don't own the display (connecting
in remotely via ssh)


On 12/28/06, Wylie, Brian <bnwylie at sandia.gov> wrote:
>
>  All,
>
> Actually I have two questions...
>
> 1) In what circumstance would anyone want to use MangledMesa?  (I'm not
> being a smartly pants, I really don't know.... we have dozens of deployments
> at Sandia and we've never used it... ever....)
> 2) If the answer to 1 is some small special case should the functionality
> be made available in some other way, and should VTK depreciate the use of
> Mangled Mesa altogether?
>
>   Brian Wylie - Org 1424
>   Sandia National Laboratories
>   MS 0822 - Building 880/A1-J
>   (505)844-2238 FAX(505)845-0833
>
>
>
>  ------------------------------
> *From:* vtkusers-bounces+bnwylie=sandia.gov at vtk.org [mailto:
> vtkusers-bounces+bnwylie=sandia.gov at vtk.org] *On Behalf Of *Randall Hand
> *Sent:* Thursday, December 28, 2006 10:16 AM
> *To:* VTK Users
> *Subject:* [vtkusers] MangledMesa & VTK
>
> I've been using MangledMesa with VTK (5.0.1) for quite a while now with
> pretty good success, but I ran into an issue where I couldn't get
> vtkTextActor's to display in the resulting displays at all.
>
> So I upgraded to a newer VTK hoping this was fixed (Paraview-2-6 branch)
> and recompiled everything.  Now my resulting renderings are completely
> blank.  I did have some issues with getting it to compile as it seems a few
> of the files in the Rendering directory have desynced between the vtkMesa*
> and vtkOpenGL* versions.  I manually resynced them (Just had to copy some
> function definitions in the .h files over) and it compiled.
>
> So my question is a 2 parter:
> 1) Anyone know how to get TextActors to work with the 5.0.1 VTK?  Was
> there a known bug around that time that's been fixed, or is there some new
> option that must be enabled to get it to work?
> 2) How to I get MangledMEsa to work in the newer VTK releases?  Right now
> i'm getting either blank or random-garbage displays.
>
> --
> ----------------------------------------
> Randall Hand
> Visualization Scientist
> ERDC MSRC-ITL
>
>


-- 
----------------------------------------
Randall Hand
Visualization Scientist
ERDC MSRC-ITL
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