Where is the choice to disable the fast preview window documented?

[johnfi...@gmail.com]

I eventually found out the method (hold ctrl while starting hugin) and then found the place that is documented for re enabling fast preview window (it brings up a dialog that lets you choose).  But I didn't find any documentation of using that to avoid the crash on hugin statup that might require it.

IIUC, some graphics chipsets don't have correct enough EGL support for that fast preview window to work with newer (after 3.1.? I forget which exact version of wxWidgets) and will cause hugin to crash during startup if you are using that newer wxWidgets.

My own very old graphics chipset (one that needs the 340 version of the closed source Nvidia driver) doesn't even allow building hugin from source when using wxWidgets 3.1.5

I kludged past that build problem, which I think gets me to the place the next version better (of still obsolete) Nvidia driver would be (but I can't be certain).  Hugin then builds, but crashes on startup due to defective EGL support in the driver.  That is unless you have set the right hidden setting to disable creation of the problem window.  The easiest way to set that hidden setting is to hold ctrl down while starting hugin.  (Simply never opening that window isn't enough.  It crashes on creation during hugin startup).

Maybe few other users are stuck (short of buying new hardware) with a driver with broken EGL support.  Maybe some of those are able to stick with wxWidgets 3.0 (I likely could have, except for testing a feature I added).

So maybe this was all just a problem for me.  But in case it isn't, I think some description of the problem and solution (maybe more accurate than I just gave) should be somewhere more obvious.

[Bruno Postle]

On Sun, 6 Feb 2022 at 23:24, johnfine2017 wrote:
>
> I eventually found out the method (hold ctrl while starting hugin) and then found the place that is documented for re enabling fast preview window (it brings up a dialog that lets you choose). But I didn't find any documentation of using that to avoid the crash on hugin statup that might require it.

It is mentioned in the FAQ, but only for undisabling the Fast Preview
window: https://wiki.panotools.org/Hugin_FAQ#Simple_user_interface_can_not_selected_.2F_OpenGL_fast_preview_window_button_is_disabled

I thought this startup crash had been resolved by automatically
disabling the Fast Preview window in this situation (it has been a
long time since it was last reported). If the Ctrl trick is definitely
still required, the FAQ is a wiki page and can be edited.

--
Bruno

[johnfi...@gmail.com]

On Sunday, February 6, 2022 at 6:55:26 PM UTC-5 bruno...@gmail.com wrote:

 

I thought this startup crash had been resolved by automatically
disabling the Fast Preview window in this situation (it has been a
long time since it was last reported). If the Ctrl trick is definitely
still required, the FAQ is a wiki page and can be edited.

I saw that code for automatically disabling the  Fast Preview window and saw it didn't.  But I didn't fully debug why.

I'm not sure about any of this.

Best estimate, someone with my same hardware could not get far enough for this ctrl thing to even help.  They could only use hugin linked with an older wxWidgets.  But maybe I did something else wrong (could have installed the driver differently or installed something more).  Maybe there is even a way to get EGL to work, or maybe I did something wrong that makes hugin fail to detect that EGL won't work.

About the next architecture up among obsolete Nvidia architectures, I'm barely more than guessing.  I had lots of trouble getting other things to work with this obsolete hardware (even more so before switching from Ubuntu to Fedora) and googled all those problems and mostly found discussions of the same problems but for the 390 driver rather than the 340.  So I build up an estimate of what is worse in the 340 (including the reason I couldn't build hugin normally with wxWidgets 3.1.5) vs. what is the same, which I think includes why it crashes on construction of wxCanvas.

But all that might be my misinterpretation of those problem / solution reports on related but non-hugin issues.  Maybe the whole reason I needed a way to disable construction of that widget is because of the way I kludged things to be able to use wxWidgets 3.1.5 instead of 3.0.  Then I looked in the code to try to find a place to put a disable to make my code usable, and I saw that disable was already in the code and I could use it without further private code changes.

Alternately, maybe this problem WAS gone but driver updates changing the partial level of EGL in those drivers broke the logic that disables that widget without fixing the need to disable it, bringing the problem back.

[T. Modes]

bruno...@gmail.com schrieb am Montag, 7. Februar 2022 um 00:55:26 UTC+1:

I thought this startup crash had been resolved by automatically
disabling the Fast Preview window in this situation (it has been a
long time since it was last reported).

This is probably a build issue. The configurations of wxWidgets and GLEW needs to be synchronized (either glx or egl). This is not checked by CMake and also not at run-time and  results in crashes during initialization of the fast preview windows. This has been documented in INSTALL_cmake and needs to considered during the build.