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NAG's IRIS Explorer™ - Frequently Asked Questions - IBM (AIX)

This document is designed for users of IRIS Explorer with IBM (AIX) 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

Starting up one of the Render, DisplayImg or TransformGen modules generates the message: "X Error of failed request: BadColor (invalid Colormap parameter)"[Top]

The DISPLAY environment variable is either not set, or is set to":0.0" causing the system to use "direct rendering". To avoid this, modify the DISPLAY variable to contain your hostname, e.g. on a system called "dennis":

C shell users

% setenv DISPLAY dennis:0.0

Bash/Korn shell users:

% DISPLAY=dennis:0.0 % export DISPLAY

N.B. This may cause a slight decrease in performance

The little module control panels in the map editor window are missing the minimize/maximize buttons that should be at the top right of each panel. [Top]

If you look closely, they're not actually missing; they're just extremely small. This is because your Motif runtime library is version 1.1.4, not 1.2 [or later] that Explorer requires. As a temporary measure (while you're upgrading your Motif library) you can get the buttons more visible by editing

"$EXPLORERHOME/lib/X11/app-defaults/Explorer"

and changing the lines:

map Editor*miniCpBase*miniCpMgrForm*miniCpMaxBtn*shadowThickness: 0

map Editor*miniCpBase*miniCpMgrForm*miniCpMicroBtn*shadowThickness: 0

If you increase these values to 2, you can see where the button widgets are. You could also experiment with changing the widget sizes, which are by default 16x16 pixels.

The colours on my windows change as I move from window to window. [Top]

Some graphics adaptors support only 8 bits per pixel, i.e. only 256 colors on screen at a time. This sometimes forces the window manager to switch colormaps as the user moves from window to window. To ensure this happens correctly when using IRIS Explorer the environment variable "CXCOLORMAP" should be set before running IRIS Explorer:

C shell users

% setenv CXCOLORMAP

Bash/Korn shell users:

% CXCOLORMAP=
% export CXCOLORMAP

When I use the light editors the X server to crashes. [Top]

This is caused by a problem either in OpenInventor, (the library upon which the IRIS Explorer graphics are built) or the IBM OpenGL implementation. It will be fixed in a future version of IRIS Explorer. Until this release, use of the light editors should be avoided.

Running the Render module causes the following message: [Top]

Render: Inventor error in SoXtGLWidget::buildOverlayGLXWidget(): could not create overlay visual.

This is just a warning and can be ignored.