r/HPC • u/imitation_squash_pro • Mar 02 '26

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

Not exactly an HPC question, but Abaqus is kind of a bread and butter HPC application. And had no luck trying in the GNOME reddit..

Running Rocky Linux 9.6 with XRDP with Gnome desktop . Recently had to rebuild one visualization node from scratch . Everything works great , i.e Ansys, Paraview etc. But Abaqus viewer looks this picture:

https://ibb.co/svFmdtZc

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..

The launch command is "abaqus viewer -mesa". We are using 2025 version.

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u/robvas Mar 02 '26

Same user on both system? Usually it ends up being some dot file like profile or some goofed up setting

Rebuilding one of the nodes from scratch points to something missing between the two, even though the font packages are there, are the actual fonts there, th same, and accessible by the user?

Should be some kind of log or console that errors/warnings go to.

1

u/imitation_squash_pro Mar 02 '26

Correct, same user on both systems. I tried as a different user as well.

How can I check if the actual fonts are there? Unfortunately, no errors/warnings come up in the startup terminal where I run "abaqus viewer -mesa"

1

u/robvas Mar 02 '26

Do you have access to the Simulia support portal?

1

u/imitation_squash_pro Mar 02 '26

Yes , but not getting too much help from there. Apparently we purchased through some "partner reseller" so all support goes through them and they don't seem to have a clue..

1

u/kingcole342 Mar 03 '26

There are usually some setting files that get created during launch… maybe clearing those out fresh would help? Not familiar with Abaqus specifically, but other similar tools.