ParaViewWeb with system tomcat package

ParaViewWeb

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Introduction

The tomcat package that come inside the system package of a Linux distribution, has two limitation that needs to be managed in order to run ParaViewWeb on it. The first one is related to the fact that the system tomcat do not start in a run-level that has a server X which force or ParaView to not use the screen and therefore the GPU. For that special case, ParaView needs to be compiled with OSMesa. The second limitation is because of some security setting that prevent any web application to read/write anywhere on the disk or execute command lines.

Compiling ParaView with OSMesa

This will allow ParaView and therefore ParaViewWeb to work on an headless server. (No GPU, no server X)

System dependency

apt-get install xutils-dev

Compile OSMesa

mkdir OSMesa
cd OSMesa
mkdir install

wget ftp://ftp.freedesktop.org/pub/mesa/7.10.2/MesaLib-7.10.2.tar.gz
tar xvfz MesaLib-7.10.2.tar.gz
cd MesaLib-7.10.2

./configure --with-driver=xlib --disable-gallium --disable-egl --disable-glw --enable-gl-osmesa --prefix=../install
make
make install

Compile ParaView

BUILD_SHARED_LIBS          ON
CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE           Debug
CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX       /home/seb/Kitware/Projects/ParaView4/install-osmesa
PARAVIEW_BUILD_QT_GUI      OFF
PARAVIEW_ENABLE_PYTHON     ON
VTK_OPENGL_HAS_OSMESA      ON

OSMESA_INCLUDE_DIR         /home/seb/Kitware/Projects/OSMesa/install/include/
OSMESA_LIBRARY             /home/seb/Kitware/Projects/OSMesa/install/lib/libOSMesa.so
VTK_USE_OFFSCREEN          ON
VTK_USE_X                  OFF

OPENGL_INCLUDE_DIR
OPENGL_gl_LIBRARY
OPENGL_glu_LIBRARY
OPENGL_xmesa_INCLUDE_DIR   OPENGL_xmesa_INCLUDE_DIR-NOTFOUND

Configuring Tomcat

This explanation are based on an Ubuntu Linux distribution, so some explanation may need to be adjusted.