I am using proprietary software (Maxwell 4, a rendering program) on a headless server that I do not have physical access to. I do have SSH access (and can use RDP).
When running the software it tries to open some GUIs, but it being a headless server this of course fails. I have tried two things: to forward the GUIs to my local (windows) machine and to run it in RDP, but neither work.
System Info:
Ubuntu 18.04 with GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Rev
Attempt 1: Using windows Remote Desktop Connection
I can connect to the headless server as expected and open folders/programs/terminals and such When I try to run this piece of software it gives me a libGL error.
libGL error: MESA-LOADER: failed to open swrast (search paths /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri:\$${ORIGIN}/dri:/usr/lib/dri)
libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
Seems like a clear driver issue. When I look for this issue in relation to the software I'm trying to run, it returns no results. Based on information I could find I have tried to make sure that libGL and swrast are properly installed
For libGL, multiple answers inform me I should install the correct version for my system. However, no answer explains how to decide which version is correct. I tried the following but the error persisted.
sudo apt-get install -y mesa-utils libgl1-mesa-glx
Attempt 2: putty with x-forwarding and xMing
This seemed like a long-shot but as I do not know enough about this topic it seemed worth a short.
I configured putty and xMing in a way that seems to work. I can run
xclock
on the server and it will open a little window on my local machine. When trying to start the software it returns the following error:
QXcbConnection: Could not connect to display
Things that are not clear to me.
It seems like the QXcbConnection is caused by the headless server not being able to forward the content to xMing. I suspect that even if I somehow fixed this, the above libGL would still persist.
As I understand it, libGl is trying to open swrast. When looking for swrast, all I can find it other user explaining it does not work. As such, I am not sure what it does/is for.
As I am entirely unfamiliar with libGl, swrast, QXcbConnection and rendering in general, I don't even know where to start debugging. Is there a way to test swrast?
