Difference between revisions of "FAQ"

Latest revision as of 00:12, 4 December 2021

This is the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page for PANGU.

Error: not authorised

The most common reason for this problem is failure to open a new terminal window after setting the PANGU_LICENCE_FILE environment variable. If you don't have a licence file for your machine then you must request one via the licence request page on the pangu.software site.

Note: used licence file ′′

If the licence file used by PANGU is reported as the empty string ′′ then you probably forgot to close the terminal/command window and open a new one after setting the PANGU_LICENCE_FILE environment variable. Environment variable changes will only apply to programs that are started after the change is made. So any existing windows will use the previous setting.

The specified licence file is not found

Check that the PANGU_LICENCE_FILE environment variable is set correctly. At a Windows/DOS/cmd.exe prompt type:

type %PANGU_LICENCE_FILE%

For Linux users type:

cat $PANGU_LICENCE_FILE

If the contents of the licence file are not displayed then the environment variable is wrong. Correct the error and remember to close the terminal and open a new one.

Qt viewer crash with when in non-US/C locales [SPR00026]

When running the Qt viewer with the locale set to something other than US or C (e.g. a European locale such as fr_FR or it_IT), the PANGU v4 and PANGU v5 viewers would crash during parsing of floating point values on the command line or in parameter files such as the star catalogue or pangu.ini. This issue was fixed in PANGU v5.50.

The work-around for older versions of the viewer is to temporarily set the locale (LC_ALL) to “en_US” or “C” before running the viewer e.g. under Linux:

$ LC_ALL="C" ./bin/viewer ...

This issue doesn’t affect non-Qt programs such as surfacemodeller or panviewer_glut.

QGtkStyle was unable to detect the current GTK+ theme [SPR00029]

This error might occur when running the PANGU Qt viewers under Linux when using XFCE, LXDE or KDE desktops with Ubuntu 18.04. This affects any Qt application, not just PANGU.

The simplest solution is to define the following environment variable:

GTK2_RC_FILES="$HOME/.gtkrc-2.0:/etc/gtk-2.0/gtkrc"

If neither of those configuration files exists then create a text file called .gtkrc-2.0 in your home directory and add the following line of text to it:

 gtk-theme-name="GTK+"

Save the file and the issue ought to be resolved.

For more details see http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/running-vlc-in-xfce/

Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module" [SPR00030]

This error might occur when running the PANGU Qt viewers under Linux when using XFCE, LXDE or KDE desktops with Ubuntu 18.04. This affects any Qt application, not just PANGU.

The problem is due to the specified module not being installed on your system.

Ubuntu users might be able to resolve this issue by using this command:

sudo apt install libcanberra-gtk-module

CentOS users might need to use one of these commands instead:

sudo yum install libcanberra-gtk2
sudo yum install libcanberra-gtk3

See https://askubuntu.com/questions/208431/failed-to-load-module-canberra-gtk-module or https://askubuntu.com/questions/971560/what-is-the-purpose-of-canberra-gtk-module for more details.

Save-as crash/freeze using Qt5 on Windows 7 on a Dell [SPR00042]

The Dell Backup and Recovery tool on Windows 7 causes Qt5 applications (such as the viewer) to crash when opening a file manager dialog e.g. using “Save Image As”. After the crash Windows 7 will adjust the way in which the viewer runs which will prevent a crash for the affected dialog window only. However, the dialog will be blank except “Save” and “Cancel” buttons. Pressing the “Cancel” button and then trying again will work around the issue for that dialog until the viewer quits. The process must be repeated for the other file dialogs.

For more details please refer to the following bug report from May 2015: https://www.dell.com/community/Productivity-Software/Backup-and-Recovery-causing-applications-using-Qt5-DLLs-to-crash/td-p/4590325

Uninstalling the Dell Backup and Recovery tool will resolve the issue.

Performance boost with __GL_DEBUGGER=1 when using NVIDIA drivers under Linux

Linux users may notice a substantial performance increase if the viewer is executed under a debugger, a system call profiler (e.g. strace) or if the __GL_DEBUGGER environment variable is set to 1.

It is believed that the NVIDIA drivers analyse the initial rendering calls issued by an application to detect the game or application that is being run. The result is used to select internal settings in the driver which negatively affect the performance of the PANGU viewer. When the application is operating in debugging mode the effects of the detection algorithm appear to be disabled.

Linux users with native NVIDIA drivers may wish to set __GL_DEBUGGER=1 before running the viewer. There do not appear to be any other side-effects to enabling this setting. Bash shell users can set the environment variable just for a specific viewer execution (e.g. for use in scripts) via the following shell syntax:

$ __GL_DEBUGGER=1 ./bin/viewer ...

pan2cad: incorrect scaling in COLLADA files

Prior to version 5.50(2), COLLADA (.dae) files generated by pan2cad had <scale> nodes in which the y/z elements were incorrectly swapped over.

The work-around for affected versions of pan2cad is to manually swap the y/z elements of every non-trivial <scale> node (or use a different CAD output format). Most <scale> nodes in a COLLADA file will be for unit scaling (1 1 1) and don't need swapping.

pangu_gui: Java: Unsupported major.minor version 52.0

The PANGU GUI requires 64-bit Java 1.8 (aka Java 8) or newer to run. If you have an older version of Java then the Java GUI will fail to start and Java will report an exception: Unsupported major.minor version 52.0.

Please install 64-bit JRE 1.8 (aka JRE 8) or newer: 32-bit Java will not work.