Installing SBGrid Software
Using the SBGrid Environment
Support for Site Administrators
Hardware Support Notes
Getting Help
Support for Developers
SBGrid programs can be used with a variety of remote graphics tools, as long as those tools are configured correctly. GUI programs using OpenGL (for example, coot or chimerax - in general, a program used for 3D visualization) can be more problematic than those without it (for example, ccp4i or relion).
Remote graphics tools generally fall into two categories: ssh
graphics forwarding, and remote "desktop" tools (for example, RealVNC, XPRA, OOD, FastX - although some of these can display single applications in addition to remote desktops).
Using ssh -Y
or ssh -X
requires less additional software, but can be problematic to configure correctly (and even when working, tends to be less robust and performant than other approaches).
ssh -Y
or ssh -X
, XQuartz needs to be installed and functional for local programs (in other words, echo $DISPLAY
and launchctl getenv DISPLAY
)./var/log/Xorg.${n}.log
, where ${n}
is the session number) and XQuartz logs (MacOS, typically under ~/Library/Logs/X11/
) usually have information that's helpful for troubleshooting.glxinfo
works over the remote connection, and is reporting an OpenGL version equal to or greater than that required by the program you're using. If glxinfo
crashes, the same logs mentioned earlier are helpful for troubleshooting. If glxinfo
isn't installed, please check the workstation setup page for missing dependencies.glxinfo
output, sbinfo
output from the local and remote systems, and (for MacOS) the output of defaults read org.xquartz.X11
(and defaults read org.macos.xquartz
).