Abaqus GUI launches without any fonts for the menu items?! But works on another node. Installed fonts seem identical

Running Rocky Linux 9.6 with XRDP with Gnome desktop . Recently had to rebuild one visualization node from scratch using a minimal ISO image ( 2GB ). Everything works great , i.e Ansys, Paraview etc. But Abaqus viewer looks like picture below.

The strange thing is it works fine on our second visualization node which is almost identical setup . I compared the installed fonts via “rpm -qa | grep -i font” and they are the same.. I am not sure if the other node was installed using minimal ISO or full DVD though.

The launch command is "abaqus viewer -mesa”.

Have you asked the makers of Abaqus? They should be able to provide you with a list of the required dependency to allow their application to work correctly.

Since the software is proprietary and made by Dassault Systemes and the fact we cannot download or use it if we don’t purchase it means it’s difficult for anyone to help out or even debug the problem. Ideally it would be best for you to ask the support team of Abaqus. There is even a Abaqus community apparently once logged into the 3DS system.

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If you think the problem is a missing rpm on the system that isn’t working, dump a list of the installed rpms on each system to a text file and then use “sort file1 file2 | uniq -u” to show you a list of the rpms that exist on one of the computers and not on the other.

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Thanks, I did reach out to our Abaqus support partner but haven’t heard anything back. Guess they don’t know much about the error. But good tip about the abaqus community page. Seems there is also a facebook group for Abaqus users:

If no luck there I will try with the 3DS community..

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Thanks, I tried that but there are a 100+ different rpms between the working and non-working system. I scanned them and hard to know if one might be the culprit..

I finally did hear back from Abaqus support and they asked me to verify the locale is the same between the two machines. I did that as follows which seems to show them the same:

Since one system is working as needed and the other isn’t, and if you don’t know which missing rpm could be at fault, you could solve the problem by installing all of the rpms that show as missing on the non-working system.

The worst thing that could happen is that you install a few unneeded rpms, but if that gets the system working as you want it to then why would it matter?

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Good idea, but will consider that as a last resort! For now just want to find the root cause of the problem. Only difference that comes to mind is that the working machine used a full Rocky Linux ISO for the OS install. The broken machine I used a “minimal” image ISO. Not sure if that could be the difference?

I’ve also compared all the fonts in /usr/share/fonts and /usr/share/X11/fonts and everything looks the same.

Is it likely some X11 issue ? If I do ssh -Y from the broken machine to the working machine and launch Abaqus, it will still display the same broken fonts..

Ok, to find the actual problem you can either install each of the “missing” rpms one at a time and see when the program you want to use starts working. Then the last rpm you installed was the problem.

It might be better to go the other way, though, and install all of the missing rpms. Then you can determine that the program actually works under those circumstances. If it doesn’t, then you’re wasting your time pursuing this avenue and the problem is a configuration issue on the troublesome machine. But if it does work, then you can remove the “new” rpms one at a time and when the program stops working, the last thing you removed is the one that was required.

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One approach that might get you some useful output is to launch the program from a terminal commandline. I’ve done this in the past and it has been helpful.