Redraw problems on OSX 10.6

[davclark]

Hi there,

I am working on learning Anatomist, and unfortunately, I only have macbooks for this purpose. I tried anatomist on both a 2007 White MacBook (intel GMA 950 integrated graphics) and the 2010 MacBook Air (Nvidia 320M). In both cases, tooltip windows (from UI buttons or image info from hovering over the image itself) leave behind a patch of blackness on brain image renderings. Moving the window also often results in blanking of one or two views (in both single-view windows, as well as the 4-view). The remainder of the interface is undisturbed, and the actual brain image views refresh upon clicking (though I then get a cursor movement).

Is this a known problem? Is there a workaround? I'm moderately competent with debugging, and could probably do most of the work here. But I'm afraid I don't know quite where to start.

A colleague tried this on Windows, and it is fine there. I have Ubuntu on the laptop with the intel chip, and Anatomist runs fine there (e.g., no black patches)!

Answer this, then on to more prosaic questions...

Many thanks,
Dav Clark

[riviere]

Hi Dav,
I think I remember seing this kind of thing on someone else's Mac some months ago, but I don't remember precisely, and I did not understand what was going on. Anatomist runs correctly on some other Macs (on ours, with MacOS 10.5) and on all other systems, so I rather suspect either the 3d driver / OpenGL implementation, or maybe Qt not correctly reporting expose events needing a redraw, more probably than a bug in Anatomist. It could be related to the fact that the BrainVisa-Mac binaries have been built on MacOS 10.5 (including Qt) and are running on 10.6 in your case, but I cannot be sure, I don't know if the problem is present on all 10.6 Macs, and I even cannot test (we have only one Mac, in 10.5).
I know at least that Olivier (developping the cortical_surface toolbox) is working on a MacOS-10.6 and doesn't seem to have such problems, but he has compiled everything and is not running a 10.5 binary package.
So I am sorry but I don't think I can do much for it currently...
Denis

[davclark]

Thanks Denis!

Sounds like perhaps the best approach is to compile myself. Is Olivier likely to see this? If I don't hear anything in a few days (or if I'm encouraged to do so earlier), I'll e-mail him directly re: any special concerns / setup for compiling on OSX.

Cheers,
Dav

[riviere]

Well, it's possibly the only solution at the moment, but I have to warn that compiling on a Mac will require to install a number of dependencies, which is quite painful and time consuming: especially you will have to install cmake, libsigc++, blitz++, boost, Qt, sip, PyQt, plus (optionally) a number of others which are not provided on MacOS in the classical shape (I don't remember exactly but I think some of libjpeg, libpng, libtiff needs to be reinstalled), and possibly DCMTK, Qwt and some python modules (ipython, matplotlib etc). Of course all are not mandatory, but it's a real work in any case...

Denis

[Dominique Geffroy]

Hi,

You'll find useful instructions about getting the source and compiling on our source repository red-mine interface : https://bioproj.extra.cea.fr/redmine/pr ... A_projects
To log in, you can use the public account: brainvisa - Soma2009
More information about our source repository here: http://brainvisa.info/repository.html

Dominique

[Olivier Coulon]

Hello there,
I actually have the same problem although I compiled everything on my own 10.6 machine. It has not been a big enough problem for me to care too much about it, I had too much to do otherwise. I suspect it is a problem related to the focus of the mouse on 10.6 but I am not sure about it. So Dav, since compiling yourself will probably not solve your problem, my advice is DON'T DO IT. Mac OsX 10.6 has seen the transition from 32 to 64 bits, and it is very painful with the co-existence of 32 bits and 64 bits compiled binaries nt eh same system. This brings a lot of problem when dealing with Python related libraries such as PyQt or PyQwt. Personally I still have unresolved conflicts between MatPlotLib and Qt4. It took me many many hours before I could do it. At the worst you run the risk to completely mess up your system and you would have to reinstall the whole thing...
I know it does not help much but we are probably stuck with the problem just now. Next MacOs version might help (or make it worse )

Olivier

[davclark]

Bummer! Well, thanks for saving me the effort... for what it's worth, I'm using homebrew, and it at least installed pyqt without complaint (usually a big headache in my experience).

But, I guess I'll just put up with it for now.

Thanks,
Dav