Ubuntu 18 version of VisIt hangs at startup on WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux)

[brugger1]

Jose reported that VisIt 3.1.4 hangs at startup when he runs the Ubuntu 18 version on WSL.

I went ahead and installed Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on my system.

Once I had Ubuntu 18.04 LTS installed I had to figure out how to use it. The Ubuntu 18 install added an Ubuntu 18.04 LTS entry in the Start menu. I clicked on it and it brought up a shell window. My first task was to figure out how to display a graphical program from the Ubuntu 18 shell on my Windows desktop. I found the following links useful.

https://github.com/QMonkey/wsl-tutorial
https://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2017/02/08/graphical-programs-on-windows-subsystem-on-linux.aspx

I saw I needed to have an X server running on Windows, so I just started up my XWin-32 18 and used it. I then did the following in the shell.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

sudo apt-get install x11-apps

export DISPLAY=:0.0
export LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1

xeyes

This was successful. Now on to running VisIt.

I found that you can access the Windows file system through /mnt/c. So doing the following could be used to copy the Ubuntu version of VisIt 3.1.4 and the visit-install script to my home directory after downloading them to my Windows Downloads folder.

cp /mnt/c/Users/brugger1/Downloads/visit3.1.4.linux-x86_64-ubuntu18.tar.gz .
cp /mnt/c/Users/brugger1/Downloads/visit-install .

I then installed VisIt 3.1.4 and ran it.

My first error I ran into was with the GUI not being able to find the library libQt5Core.so.5. I checked and the library was there. I did some searching on the web and found the following useful link.

microsoft/WSL#3023

Using the advice from the link I did

strip --remove-section=.note.ABI-tag visit/3.1.4/linux-x86_64/lib/libQt5Core.so.5

This got me to the hang that Jose reported. Here is the output from the A.gui.5.vlog file:

Successfully loaded info about 68 operator plugins.
Reading from the viewer's socket is currently not allowed!
QvisGUIApplication::HeavyInitialization: heavyInitStage=13
Reading from the viewer's socket is currently not allowed!
QvisGUIApplication::HeavyInitialization: heavyInitStage=14
Reading from the viewer's socket is currently not allowed!
QvisGUIApplication::HeavyInitialization: heavyInitStage=15
Xfer::Update: Sending: opcode=22, name=LoadPluginsRPC
Xfer::Update: Sending: opcode=0, name=ViewerRPC
Reading from the viewer's socket is currently not allowed!
QvisGUIApplication::HeavyInitialization: heavyInitStage=16
Xfer::Update: Sending: opcode=2, name=SyncAttributes
Xfer::Process: Opcode=47, len=167, type=ViewerRPC
Xfer::Process: Opcode=47, len=269, type=ViewerRPC

It looks like there is a problem reading from the viewer's socket.

[biagas]

It is possible to run VisIt in WSL2 Ubuntu image on a Windows 11 system running the proper OS build number (22000 or greater).

Following Microsoft's wsl2 gui-apps tutorial, I installed WSL on a Windows 11 system running a build > 22000.
I then installed Ubuntu-18 using this tutorial as a guide.
I also installed x11, xcb, xutils, xorg, and libfreetype packages as listed in our Dockerfile-ubuntu18.
I then installed visit 3.3.1 using the directions @brugger1 listed above.

Visit ran, with windows displaying in the Windows desktop. I successfully created a Pseudocolor plot of the test data installed on the Ubuntu image.

[biagas]

Note: I didn't need to start an X server like XWin32.

[biagas]

I guess I should also mention I installed Windows Terminal, and launched the Ubuntu instance from there.

[brugger1]

Thanks @biagas for confirming that the Ubuntu 18 version runs on WSL. Closing now.