Show graphics not working on Ubuntu

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Marathon

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Joined: 26 Jan 09
Posts: 28
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Message 77769 - Posted: 7 May 2017, 0:50:21 UTC
Last modified: 7 May 2017, 0:58:22 UTC

I found a previous thread, https://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=10704&postid=68399#68399 , but I'm unable to reply to it.

I've been using OpenSuSE for years, but, for at least the current and previous versions, I have not been able to run BOINC. So, I thought I'd give Ubuntu another try.

I recently installed KUbuntu 17.04 (Ubuntu with KDE).
BOINC version 7.6.33, X64 with wxWidgets 3.0.2, installed by Ubuntu Software Center ("Discover").

Currently, I'm running World Community Grid and SETI@Home.

BOINC runs very well, but I'm not able to see any graphics. When I select a SETI@Home v8.800 task with "Running" status, and click "Show Graphics", either nothing visible happens or a rectangle outline appears and vanishes, in nearly subliminal time. With Workd Community Grid, I see nothing when the task is Mapping Cancer Markers. When the task is FightAIDS@Home or one of the Zika tasks, the rectangle has a title bar, with text. But, there is no time to read the text before it vanishes.

When I was using BOINC on OpenSuSE, I used the Berkeley installer. When something wasn't working, I would run the BOINC Manager from a command window, which would allow me to see error messages, including those that came from using "Show Graphics." This allowed me to detect and fix several problems. But, this doesn't happen with my Ubuntu box.

The previous thread suggested looking for "stderr" files for BOINC. But the only "err" file I find is /var/lib/boinc-client/stderrgpudetect.txt, and it is empty.

I tried using the Boinccmd tool http://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Boinccmd_tool to get a list of tasks, and then ask for graphics. But, the requests generates an "unknown op" error:

john@doe:/var/lib/boinc-client$ boinccmd --task http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ 30mr08ag.7300.70860.13.40.43_0 graphics_window
Unknown op graphics_window
john@doe:/var/lib/boinc-client$ boinccmd --task http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ 30mr08ag.7300.70860.13.40.43_0 graphics_fullscreen
Unknown op graphics_fullscreen


(The task name was typed just after the URL. It shows on a separate line here because that is where the lines broke with the font size in my command window.)

How can I find out why "show graphics" isn't working on my system?
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Marathon

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Joined: 26 Jan 09
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Message 77774 - Posted: 7 May 2017, 19:11:43 UTC - in response to Message 77769.  

I suspect all attempt begin to draw a window frame. I suspect it has varying degrees of visibility, depending on how long it takes for the system to recognize an error and terminate the new window.
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MarkJ
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Message 77780 - Posted: 8 May 2017, 10:24:27 UTC

The Debian guys have moved the logs to /var/log in their startup script. Ubuntu is based on Debian. There should be a BOINC.log in there. I don't get anything in the gpudetect files either and mine are working :-)
MarkJ
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Marathon

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Message 77863 - Posted: 12 May 2017, 1:38:22 UTC
Last modified: 12 May 2017, 1:40:30 UTC

It's fixed!

😳 Most of the solution was in the thread I referenced in my post: I added my user to the boinc group. I failed to notice it there.

The BOINC logs in /var/log had no useful information to help fix this. I found some messages from BOINC in /var/log/syslog corresponding to my attempts to "show graphics". Google said that these messages indicated that the program that generated an error wasn't a member of a package, so a debugging information request was ignored.

By chance, I found a hidden .BOINC directory in my home directory. It had a lot of messages like this:
** (boincmgr:2935): WARNING **: Invalid borders specified for theme pixmap:
        /usr/share/themes/Breeze/gtk-2.0/../assets/line-h.png,
borders don't fit within the image

But, those are warnings, so not relevant to my issue. What was relevant were these messages: execv: Permission denied

So, I tried "sudo boincmgr". That allowed me to use "show graphics" for Mapping Cancer Markers, the only type World Community Grid tasks that were on my computer at the time. It did not fix the problem with SETI@Home. I used Synaptic package manager instead of Discover, and found I could install more software for SETI@Home graphics.
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Message boards : Questions and problems : Show graphics not working on Ubuntu

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