reiche

I upgraded to 10.3 and the new X11 recently.
I have idl installed on my mac and on a Linux machine. To access the
Linux machine I use
the "ssh -XC host" command.

The IDL version on my mac works fine but I got a problem with the
remote machine using iTools.
Before it was fine but now labels, axis and the drawing regions show
up as black boxes. Because I didn't changed in the IDL installation I
think it must by caused by the X11 server.

Any idea, how to solve this problem?

Thanks
Sven

karl schultz

news:<84e0927a.0310161749.603d009b@posting.google. com>...

I was able to reproduce it here; I'll file a bug report if there is not one
already.


Here is a workaround:

On your Linux machine, edit ~/.Xresources and add the line:

idl.renderer: 1

Then,

xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources

and restart IDL.

(Or do whatever it takes to use "software rendering".)


Here is the explanation:

IDL ran OK locally on your Mac because the OpenGL graphics were going
through a direct optimized (and highly tested) connection. When you connect
a remote application (IDL) to your X/GLX server, the graphics commands must
be encoded into a wire protocol by the client (using libGL on Linux) and
then decoded by the X/GLX server running on your Mac. It sort of looks like
there is a bug in this conversation someplace and the texture data (used to
draw text in IDL 6.0) is getting abused somehow as it crosses over the
network.

The workaround tells IDL to not try to use the GLX protocol and to instead
render the picture on the client side and then use X (not GLX) protocol to
send the resulting image to the X server. There is an impact on your
graphics performance profile when you do this, and whether that impact is
good or bad depends on the complexity in your scene. You won't be
leveraging the spiffy graphics hardware on your Mac, but you would not be
getting much leverage anyway when running remotely.

That's the rub.

Karl

reiche

Thanks a lot.
It works now.

Sven