VESTA-x86_64 freezes when opening a file

[Karen Fernsler]

Hi,

This is happening on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS running nvidia 331.38 on a GF100GL [Quadro 4000] (rev a3).

User A can run VESTA on this machine, but when User A opens a file -- VESTA stops responding.  It doesn't display the file and needs to be force-quit.

User B can run VESTA on this machine and open this same file and manipulate it with no problems whatsoever.

Both users can use X11 tunnels to display VESTA to a remote laptop running X and open this file with no problems.

Is there something possibly in User B's $HOME or environment that would be causing the freezing problem?  Any ideas what we should look for?

thanks,
-k

[Koichi Momma]

Hi Karen,

Thank you for reporting the bug.
I thought this bug was due to buggy video drivers but if one of users of the same machine can use VESTA with no problem, the problem should not relevant to video drivers. Besides, I trust Quadro video drivers.

VESTA can use one environment variable "VESTA_PREF" for a directory to save setting files of each user. But other than that, any environment variables or PATH variables should not affect it.

Are they using the default Unity desktop environment or customizing the environment?
For example, window manager, GTK themes, etc.
Or does the account name of user A contain non-ascii characters? (It should be OK but handling of non-ascii characters is one of the most common bugs often happening in the wxWidgets.)

If you can help me debug the program, I will build a special version of VESTA to track down when exactly VESTA stops responding.

With best regards,
Koichi


Karen Fernsler wrote,On (1/28/14, 7:50 AM):

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--
Koichi Momma
National Museum of Nature and Science
4-1-1, Amakubo, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-0005, Japan
TEL: +81-(0)29-853-8163
FAX: +81-(0)29-853-8998
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[Karen Fernsler]

Hi Koichi,

Thanks for your response!

This is default Unity Desktop as near as I can tell.  It is currently running gdm for the display manager, although we also tried the kde.

The account names are all less than 8 characters, all of them ASCII.

We would be more than happy to help you track down the problem.

thanks!
-k

[Karen Fernsler]

We ended up moving all of the hidden dot files in the user's home directory out of the way, and VESTA no longer freezes.  We tried the most likely culprits first -- .bash*, .profile, .kde/ , .gnome*/*, but they didn't seem to be causing the problem.

Anyway, just wanted to update.  Thanks for your attention!

-k

[Koichi Momma]

Great! Thanks for the useful information.
Did you also try removing .VESTA/ folder?
If so, the problem is most probably due to the broken setting files.

Koichi


Karen Fernsler wrote,On (2/21/14, 9:40 AM):

[Fabian Altermann]

Sorry for hijacking this thread but I have the same problem:

User A (my user) can't open any file (.vesta,.res, .cif etc.) but the guest account on my machine can run VESTA perfectly and open structures without any problem.
What files did you delete exactly? I haven't found any config file stored in my home directory nor a .VESTA folder.

It is not a fatal problem at all but nevertheless it's a bit annoying to swap all the files around from my account to the guest account to produce graphics for my thesis...

Thanks and best regards
Fabian

[Zhenfei Liu]

Hello,

Actually I removed ALL dot files (.*) in my home directory (except
some apparently non-relevant ones, such as dropbox, chrome, etc). I
also recommend you to do that to make sure VESTA can work. Then you
need to re-configure some of your dot files that you need.


zhenfei

[Zhenfei Liu]

Hello,

Actually I removed ALL dot files (.*) in my home directory (except
some apparently non-relevant ones, such as dropbox, chrome, etc). I
also recommend you to do that to make sure VESTA can work. Then you
need to re-configure some of your dot files that you need.


zhenfei

On Wednesday, March 19, 2014 6:52:41 AM UTC-7, Fabian Altermann wrote:

[Arseny Slobodyuk]

Hi.
I think I've encountered the same error. It took some time, bit I think i discovered what causes the problem. BTW, the program freezes not only when one opens a file, it stucks also when I'm making a new structure (e.g. with 1 atom in it), probably it's related to visualization and not the file reading.
Some time ago I needed the screen magnifier and turned Gnome setting org.gnome.desktop.interface.toolkit-accessibility to "on". And then VESTA started to stuck.
Now when I turn off this setting in dconf-editor VESTA works and it doesn't with the setting on. My system is Debian Linux Wheezy with Gnome 3.

[Arseny Slobodyuk]

Forgot to mention: dconf settings are in ~/.conf/dconf/user and default value is "off", so the problem is gone when one deletes ~./conf/, along with many settings that make Gnome 3 anything usable...