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NAG's IRIS Explorer™ - Frequently Asked Questions - SGI IRIX

This document is designed for users of IRIS Explorer with SGI IRIX-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. When IRIS Explorer is started, the licensing fails, generating the error messages: [Top]
   
   Local Controller on "localhost": The license manager has sent the message
   
   Local Controller on "localhost": - No NAG license to run on this architecture -
   
   Local Controller on "localhost": while attempting to check out a license
   
   Local Controller on "localhost": for version 3.5 of IRIS_Explorer (IESG635NA)

These errors can be caused by the licensing mechanism inside IRIS Explorer 3.5, which does not recognise non-64 bit SGI architectures. Specifically, for systems where the IRIX command 'uname' returns 'IRIX' (as opposed to 'IRIX64'), IRIS Explorer 3.5 will be unable to start.

If your system is like this, an updated version of the IRIS Explorer Local Controller is required. Please contact your nearest IRIS Explorer Center for information on how to obtain it.

2. Image processing modules (e.g. DisplayImg) fail. Often the error message generated is like this: [Top]

"DisplayImg": module failed during initialization; check that it can be executed outside of Explorer. Operating system returned: Nothing

IRIS Explorer uses the ImageVision libraries for many of its image processing functions. On SGI systems, IRIS Explorer 3.5 requires version 3.0 of the ImageVision Library to be installed. As there exist incompatibilities between the versions of ImageVision, problems occur if you have a different version. [This is not a problem in IRIS Explorer 4.0 or later, as the later releases do not rely on a specific version of ImageVision being installed.]

In order to address this you must discover what version of the ImageVision Library Execution Only Environment (short product name il_eoe) you have installed. You can do this using the showprods command like this:

% showprods il_eoe

The output will look something like this:

I = Installed, R = Removed
Name Date Description
I il_eoe 09/10/97 ImageVision Library Execution Only Environment, 3.0
I il_eoe.sw 09/10/97 ImageVision Executable Software
I il_eoe.sw.c++ 09/10/97 ImageVision Shared C++ Library

In this case, version 3.0 is installed, which is correct. If you have:

1. a lesser version, see "Answer 2a" below.
2. Version 3.0, the problem is not an ImageVision incompatibility. Contact your local IRIS Explorer Center.
3. a newer version, see "Answer 2b" below.

Please ask your nearest IRIS Explorer Center if you are unable to obtain the libraries or require further information.

Answer 2A. If the version you have installed on your system is too old, you must install a more recent version. You will find the correct version of both the IL and IFL distributions on the IRIS Explorer CD.

Answer 2B. If the version installed on your system is too new, you have three choices. You can either:

1. Downgrade the ImageVision libraries you have installed to version 3.0 (not recommended).
2. Install a compatibility subsystem from the same distribution from which you originally installed ImageVision to provide backward compatibility. For example, the distribution for IL 3.1.1 contains a subsystem called il_eoe.sw.il3_0 which provides backward compatibility for products built using IL 3.0 (e.g. IRIS Explorer). There is an additional software subsystem - the Image Format Library (IFL) - which must be installed. IL 3.0 requires IFL 1.0. Again, newer versions of IFL (e.g. 1.1.1) contain compatibility subsystems (specifically ifl_eoe.sw.ifl1_0) for this purpose.
3. If your version is 3.1.1, you will need a set of modules built to use this version from NAG. Please contact the Support to get the required file, explorer_patch2, that contains updated versions of the ImageVision components of IRIS Explorer 3.5, built on top of IL 3.1.1. Note that this directory also contains the inst images for ImageVision 3.1.1, together with those for the Image Format Library Execution Only Environment 1.1, which is a prerequisite of il_eoe.

NOTE: if your machine is an "O2", you must use option 3.

Although option 3 is required to make DisplayImg work on O2 systems, installing it on other systems will yield benefits associated with the update to IL 3.1.1, such as true X rendering for DisplayImg.

Please ask your nearest IRIS Explorer Center if you have any questions about this patch.

3. While installing IRIS Explorer, the installation program finds conflicts with libraries named like "il_eoe" and "ifl_eoe". [Top]

IRIS Explorer 3.5 for SGI systems requires version 3.0 of the ImageVision Library (IL) to be installed (as stated in Chapter A of the release notes). If you have a different version installed the installation will warn you about this.

The simplest way to proceed is NOT to install the conflicting libraries, test the image processing in IRIS Explorer (which will probably fail), then refer to Question 2 above to find the best fix for you.

4. I can't get certain modules to run on my SGI after having installed IRIS Explorer remotely via NFS. Everything executes properly on the server. [Top]

Error messages like:

"Render": Failure in executing the module.
Operating system returned: Can not access a needed shared library.

And:

"Render": module failed during initialization; this is probably a shared library compatibility problem.

Operating system returned: Nothing

These messages are caused by the absence of a required shared library on the SGI. If it's just modules that handle geometry (such as Render) that are failing in this way, then [for IRIS Explorer 3.0] you should make sure you have the inventor_eoe.sw.inventor subsystem installed on the local machine (not just on the server). See chapter 2 of the SGI release notes for more details on this, and for other software prerequisites. [IRIS Explorer 4.0 and later releases contain their own versions of the Open Inventor and ImageVision libraries, so the requirement to install these libraries separately has been removed.]

5. I've got a pair of stereo glasses, can I use them to view the scene displayed in Render in stereo? [Top]

Stereo glasses (such as CrystalEyes) work by alternately blanking each eye in synchronisation with the screen as it displays left eye and right eye views from an application. The application therefore has to display the scene twice, offsetting the camera in between each view.

The Render module can work in stereo mode; to enable it, bring up the Preference Sheet using the Preferences... item on the pop-up menu and select Stereo Viewing. Two things appear -

(a) a message giving hints about how to set the screen into stereo viewing mode. On SGIs, this is achieved using the setmon(1G) command.

(b) a dial which gives control over the camera offset between the two views; this can be used to separate the views until they appear to form a single 3D object (when the screen is in stereo viewing mode and the user is wearing the glasses).

On an Indy or Indigo, the setmon formats are STR_BOT or STR_TOP, which tell the X server that the bottom or top half of the screen is to be displayed (hence, the Render module must be placed in the correct half of the screen). When stereo is turned on, the contents of the selected half of the screen are stretched to fill the whole screen - i.e., objects displayed in the Render window are stretched vertically. To counteract this, put the following lines in the .Renderrc file in your home directory:

Separator {
PerspectiveCamera {
ViewportMapping LEAVE_ALONE
}
}