Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Topspin Display issues and Fedora - in General

I am revisiting a topic that has been already touched upon, but since this seems to be a recurring theme, I am summarizing the remedy to these problems in this post.
For example, look at this xwinplot related post earlier.

The common problem with xwinplot, nmrsim or similar is the fact that, missing display libraries make the said program die quietly.  This makes it impossible either to display a pulse program or start up the plot editor and do your thing.   I had referred to this Bruker bug post earlier, which captures the content of the problem.   The simple take home message that will help us solve this display related problem is this.  In a shell window, run the following (I am using the example of nmrsim here):

/opt/topspin/topspin -e ldd /opt/topspin/prog/mod/nmrsim.mod

You can substitute plot in place of nmrsim.mod if you are trying to troubleshoot the failure of plot module.

Now,  you get a listing of all the shared object libraries that are required and found in your distro. example : libXt.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXt.so.6

If one or more libraries are missing, on the other hand, you see something like this:

libXmu.so.6 => not found
libXpm.so.4 => not found

Your job now is to simply install these missing libraries. In case of Fedora you can simply search for libXpm or libXmu using yum and install them.  Tip:  Just install the i386 or i686.  For Topspin, you don't need the x86_64 libraries any way.  

Now fire up the respective program withing TS viz. nmrsim or plot and confirm that it works.  It did, for me.    You can iterate this procedure for any other modules with which you might have trouble later on.  The message is the same.  You are missing some important shared libraries.  Go find them !

1 comment:

  1. Since I installed Fedora 13 recently, I faced the same issues and the same solution pointed to here, worked fine. The only difference was that, when I started 'nmrsim', there was no immediate error message about missing libraries in the console window (i.e. the shell from which you start topspin). Rather than this, I got a cryptic message within topspin that referred to some dead process id. Nevertheless, when I installed the i686 version of libXmu and libXpm, the nmrsim problem disappeared.

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