LASTools and Linux -- clarification?

[Jonathan Greenberg]

Folks:

Does "make"ing the source code for LASTools give me the full suite of tools or (as it appears) only a subset of tools that will run natively in Linux?  We're trying to use the tools on a large cluster computer (Linux, of course), but I'm not seeing all the tools get created (e.g. lasground.exe).  Am I missing something?  Or do I HAVE to use wine for some of those tools?  If I do use wine, can I run it purely command line (no GUI)?  How would I do this?

--j

[Martin Isenburg]

Hello Jonathan,

First the important part. The tools are capitalized: LAStools

The LICENSE.txt file summarizes which tools are open source and which are not. The source code of the fancier tools is not open.

You can run all tools via wine without using the GUI. I assume you will script this so I wonder why you even mention the GUI ... ?

Martin

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[Kirk Waters - NOAA Federal]

Jonathan and Martin,

It's not quite that simple to run the tools in a script with wine. While you might not be doing anything that should need a GUI, the programs seem to try to open a window. If you're running headless (I know, that sounds bad), that's a problem. I think that's the "no GUI" part that Jonathan meant; the need to run headless. I've gotten around it using the xvfb (X virtual frame buffer) program. You can find lots of references on the web for it. The errors from wine and LAStools on a headless system seem to vary with the version of wine, with newer versions being much more tolerant. Sometimes you don't get to control the version though.

Kirk

[Jonathan Greenberg]

Ok, gotcha.  However, I haven't gotten even command line lasinfo.exe working with wine yet, perhaps I can get some help with this?

wine /pathto/lasinfo.exe /pathto/q40121h8101.las

err:xrandr:xrandr12_init_modes Failed to get primary CRTC info.

err:xrandr:xrandr12_init_modes Failed to get primary CRTC info.

wine: Bad EXE format for Z:\usr\apps\oa\bin\lastools\lasinfo.exe.

err:xrandr:xrandr12_init_modes Failed to get primary CRTC info.

Not sure what is happening -- the notepad test worked fine.  I do have a multiple monitor setup, but not sure if this matters.  Thoughts?

P.S. I'm aware there is an open source lasinfo that is compiled, but I'm trying to work out the Windows-level issues that I assume will be a problem with the non-open versions.

[Dennis Shimer]

Kirk

When I run on a desktop box it runs fine, though when I log in via ssh it does complain.  On the desktop it doesn't open a window (maybe just knowing it could is enough). It doesn't seem to have a problem completing the process via ssh.  I can see where it shouldn't throw up the error if you are just running it as a terminal process, but is there any problem with just ignoring it?

[Albert Godfrind]

The question is really this: while Windows is a nice platform for playing with Lidar data, any serious processing with real data is best done on Unix or Linux platforms. So it makes sense for me for making the full Lastools suite available on at least the common Linux x64 platforms.  Running the tools with wine is just not feasible for the reasons Kirk spelled out.

My suggestion is: please make a build available for all tools on Linux x64.

Albert

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[Kálmán Szalai - KAMI]

Hi All,

I do agree here. We would like to have LAStools on Linux 64 bit. I was able to compile opensource tools on Linux 64bit so it may possible to compile the closed parts too. Martin what do you think about.

KAMI



Albert Godfrind írta:

Firefox OS-ről küldve

[Kirk Waters - NOAA Federal]

Dennis,

The amount of complaining varies with the version of wine. If you're on a relatively new version, it complains but still runs. If you're on an old version (as I am currently stuck on), it causes failure. Soon we should be moving to 64-bit linux and newer wine versions. With luck that will solve my problems. Of course, I haven't tested wine and lastools with 64-bit linux, so I'd better get on that... 

A quick internet search on part of Jonathan's error message suggests it is video related and possibly nvidia driver specific. Might be worth trying the virtual frame buffer route even if you're not headless. I don't know why the LAStools make wine think they want to open a window when they clearly don't open one. All I can guess is that there is something compiled in or a setting during compile that makes it want to prepare for gui.

Kirk

[Dennis Shimer]

Got it.  Just for completeness because it works great on this configuration GUI and CL.  Only ssh complains.

wine --version ->
wine-1.6.2

uname -a  ->
3.16.0-29-generic #39-Ubuntu SMP Mon Dec 15 22:27:29 UTC 2014 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

[Jonathan Greenberg]

I'm not sure the issue is video, I've found those links also.  First, I'm not running the tools in a manner that should never create a window (this is to ultimately be run on a 600-node plus supercomputer).  Second, the error I'm really concerned about is the:

wine: Bad EXE format for Z:\pathto\lastools\lasinfo.exe.

This, I can't seem to figure out.  One thing I'm thinking and my IT folks are looking into is whether the 64-bit version of wine we have installed won't work with LAStools which, it seems, is 32-bit?  Has anyone used wine64 to run LAStools yet?

[Howard Butler]

> On Mar 5, 2015, at 11:06 AM, Albert Godfrind <albert....@oracle.com> wrote:

> The question is really this: while Windows is a nice platform for playing with Lidar data, any serious processing with real data is best done on Unix or Linux platforms. So it makes sense for me for making the full Lastools suite available on at least the common Linux x64 platforms. Running the tools with wine is just not feasible for the reasons Kirk spelled out.
>
> My suggestion is: please make a build available for all tools on Linux x64.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the current situation is you can build the open source LAStools yourself on linux without trouble, and if you want linux builds of the commercial tools, you can pay for a license to do so.

In short, if you need to do any serious processing with real data, you should pay for a real license.

Howard

[Martin Isenburg]

Hello,

> On Mar 5, 2015, at 11:06 AM, Albert Godfrind <albert....@oracle.com> wrote:
>
> My suggestion is: please make a build available for all tools on Linux x64.

As Howard correctly states: all tool needed to build a simple read-only file-based LiDAR data base as it is described here [1] are open source and should compile just fine on any platform, 32 or 64 bit.

[1] http://groups.google.com/d/topic/lastools/MoYPFzFVxa8/discussion

I currently do not build Linux versions of the closed source part of LAStools. It seems to me that most other LiDAR software packages (from larger companies with much greater resources) are also mainly using the Windows platform. That said ... from the performance comparisons that I have seen  ... even if you have to run LAStools on Linux through WinE they may still outperform other native compiled LiDAR software packages.

Regards,

Martin

[Ravi Peters]

Hi Martin,

I'm sorry to bother you again about this, but I just found this topic and just can't resist because what you say does not make complete sense to me. 

First, there are commercial alternatives on platforms other than Windows (Safe's FME, Oracle Spatial to name a few), and judging from the open source tools your complete toolset will probably compile fine on Unix-like systems without much work (you can leave out the GUIs). I'm sure many people would even be willing to help out here. 

Second, my research group happily paid for an educational license, but because of the subpar linux support I am not using your more interesting tools as much as I'ld like. Wine is not really a solution, it makes your otherwise excellent tools unreliable and --as mentioned earlier-- in some cases unusable.

Kind regards,

Ravi

Op zaterdag 7 maart 2015 09:24:03 UTC+1 schreef Martin Isenburg:

[Blake Lytle]

Jonathan -- I'm also attempting to use the closed-source LAStools on a Linux-based cluster computer. Were you able to get it working well?

I have used them quite a bit on a Windows-based computing pool that utilizes unused computers in our campus computer labs. The lack of a shared filesystem makes it inefficient compared to our cluster supercomputer. So I'm curious if you ever got something working. Please let me know!

[Jonathan Greenberg]

Lol, responding to this post almost a year later -- YES, we run LAStools on an HPC all the time via singularity.  I recently updated the image with the latest and greatest LAStools.

--j

[Rafael Wüest]

Hi Jonathan

Sounds great, would you be willing to share a singularity recipe that allows using the LAStools?