Home / Products / IRIS Explorer / FAQs - HP

NAG's IRIS Explorer™ - Frequently Asked Questions - HP

This document is designed for users of IRIS Explorer with HP-specific questions. For more general questions, or those that apply to another platform, please select one of the links provided in the right side box.

Questions

Answers

1. The IsosurfaceLat module generates geometry, which is lighted on only one side or appears completely dark. [Top]

This problem will occur on machines that do not have two-sided lighting. The side which is lighted can be flipped by setting IsosurfaceLat's "Flip Normal?" option to "Yes".

2. IRIS Explorer fails to run and generates the error message: "sh:/lib/cpp: not found". [Top]

In older releases, when IRIS Explorer is started it uses the C pre-processor to process the "Explorer.config" file in the Explorer main-level directory. The most likely explanation is that the C pre-processor is in a different location.

The simplest solution is to remove the first line from the "Explorer.config" file (#!CPP) and replace any occurrences of "CXGLTYPE" with "opengl", etc.

3. Launching any module causes IRIS Explorer to crash after issuing the following error message: "Error: widget class controlpanel has invalid compositeclassextension record User interface exited code 1". [Top]

This problem occurs when IRIS Explorer attempts to use an incompatible (i.e. different to the one that Explorer was built with) Motif shareable library. First check what versions of Motif libraries you have got installed - they are probably installed in /usr/lib as symbolic links to like this:

% ls -ls /usr/lib/libXm*

2 lrwxr-xr-x 1 root sys 25 Oct 25 1997 /usr/lib/libXm.1 --> /usr/lib/Motif1.2/libXm.1

2 lrwxr-xr-x 1 root sys 28 Oct 25 1997 /usr/lib/libXm.2 --> /usr/lib/Motif1.2_R6/libXm.2

2 lrwxr-xr-x 1 root sys 16 Nov 13 1997 /usr/lib/libXm.sl --> /usr/lib/libXm.2


Use this listing to find the file pointed to by "/usr/lib/libXm.2" (in this case "/usr/lib/Motif1.2_R6/libXm.2") and do a listing of this file, e.g.:

% cd /usr/lib/Motif1.2_R6
% ls -al libXm.2
-r-xr-xr-x 1 bin bin 2289664 May 30 1996 libXm.2*

The file IRIS Explorer requires MUST be the same as this. Beware, there are two versions named "libXm.2", so check that the size of the file to be sure. It is likely that you will find that this is the wrong version (size 2314240 bytes).

To fix the problem, you can make use of the fact that Explorer modules search the /usr/explorer/lib directory for shareable libraries before any other location. If you have the correct version of the file, copy it into the "/usr/explorer/lib" directory, otherwise contact NAG to obtain the file via FTP. Alternatively, put a link in the same ("/usr/explorer/lib") directory, to ensure that IRIS Explorer always looks at the correct file:

% cd /usr/explorer/lib
% ln -s /usr/lib/Motif1.2/libXm.1 ./libXm.sl

Note that this change will only affect IRIS Explorer. By putting the file here, we ensure that the correct Motif library is used, without moving the default location of the Motif libraries (and potentially damaging any other installed software that uses Motif).

Check that IRIS Explorer modules can now be launched properly. If you still have problems, please contact your local IRIS Explorer Center

4. Does IRIS Explorer take advantage of the hardware acceleration on my OpenGL graphics card (note: this applies to HP systems ONLY)? [Top]

IRIS Explorer 3.5 for HP systems has been built using the implementation of OpenGL from Template Graphics Systems (TGS). [Later releases use HP's implementation of OpenGL, so the rest of this answer is irrelevant for IRIS Explorer Release 4.0 and later.] This works on all HP graphics boards, but does not take advantage of any hardware acceleration offered by them. HP have since released their own implementation of OpenGL, which uses hardware acceleration on some of their boards (currently HP VISUALIZE-FX2, HP VISUALIZE-FX4 and HP VISUALIZE-FX6) and software-only rendering on other X devices. More information on HP OpenGL is available on the HP web site.

To discover if your system has HP OpenGL installed, type:

% /usr/sbin/swlist -l product | grep GL

This will give you a list of the products on the system containing the letters "GL" in their description. You will see lines similar to the following if HP OpenGL has been installed on your system:

OpenGLDevKit B.10.20 HP-UX OpenGL Developer's Kit
B6196AA B.10.20 HP-UX 700 OpenGL Run Time Environment

If you see these, you can download a set of additional modules (ColorEditor, Render, RenderRemote, TransformGen, ViewGeom, VolumeRender) that use OpenGL directly. Contact your NAG representative for more information.

More information on installing HP OpenGL is available through HP.

The HP OpenGL can also be used when building new OpenGL-based modules; please ask your nearest IRIS Explorer Center for help with this, or if you have any questions about this distribution.