Prenek GUI not displaying correctly on Ubuntu (VMware, Xorg)

[Yinglu Peng]

Dear Nek5000 users,

I’m running Prenek on Ubuntu 24.04 inside VMware Workstation 16 Player.
After switching from Wayland to Xorg, the window still shows only a blank/red screen — no menus or text.

The terminal outputs:

I/O Error: No String Terminator sent to PRS cp: cannot stat '/home/pylu/.nekdefaults': No such file or directory

I have installed xfonts-75dpi, xfonts-100dpi, Mesa and llvmpipe packages, and tried the environment variables:

export LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 export MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=llvmpipe export LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1 export XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1

but the GUI issue persists.

Has anyone run Prenek successfully under VMware Ubuntu with Xorg?
Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

Best regards,
Yinglu Peng

[Lane Carasik]

You should consider switching to use Gmsh and use Gmsh2nek instead. Prenek is not maintained.

--
Lane B. Carasik, Ph.D
He, Him, His
Assistant Professor, Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering
Director, FAST Research Group
Virginia Commonwealth University

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[Yinglu Peng]

Dear Dr. Carasik,

Thank you very much for your advice. I’m mainly trying to build simple 3-D geometries such as cylinders and flow-around-sphere cases for Nek5000. Since I’ve seen many possible mesh-generation paths (Prenek, genbox, n2to3, Gmsh + Gmsh2nek, and exo2nek), I’m wondering whether using Gmsh and Gmsh2nek would be a better and more stable option for these types of problems.

Best regards,
Yinglu Peng

lbca...@vcu.edu 在 2025年11月2日 星期日凌晨12:08:33 [UTC+8] 的信中寫道：

[Dimitrios K. Fytanidis]

Hi

I haven’t used Ubuntu in a while, but a few versions ago I fixed this issue as follows:

1. Edit xdriver.c in the prenek directory.

2. On line 234, replace the text inside the double quotes with a different font name until you find one that works.

I’ve attached a small script (run.sh) and the source file (fonts.c). Run the script to compile and list the available fonts on your system; then use one of those names in xdriver.c.

Hope this helps,

Dimitrios

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/nek5000/9e0ee85e-38c0-4419-8944-208d9e27e215n%40googlegroups.com.

[Yinglu Peng]

Hi all,

I tried modifying the font settings in xdriver.c as suggested in previous discussions (replacing the fallback font with
-adobe-courier-medium-r-normal--14-100-100-100-m-90-iso8859-1).
However, even after recompiling prenek, I still encounter display issues — the window opens but remains mostly black/red and no menus are visible (see attached screenshot).

Thanks,
Yinglu Peng

demetres...@gmail.com 在 2025年11月2日 星期日上午8:33:52 [UTC+8] 的信中寫道：