There is a renderoffscreen flag that can be used from a tcl script.

Unfortunately, this feature was broken when a particular section of the tksurfer code was commented out. The problem was that the tclscriptflag used to determine whether to open a window was not getting set to true. Look for this:

/* rkt: commented this part out. i'm not sure how it was accepting any other command line options with it active. */

I think I emailed Kevin Teich about this some time ago.

Since then, I've made a modified version of tksurfer where this problem is fixed. The solution is to actually replace tclscriptflag with the newer scriptok variable when it comes time to open a window only if not running from a script. I can send that code to the mgh guys if desired, but as I said, the fix is easy (assuming you can compile the source code).

So anyway, this modified version can render offscreen (like the prehistoric versions of tksurfer). This is very useful to me and probably to others who want to render in batches (e.g. making movies). The only remaining problem, however, is that you still need a valid display. So for example, you can't run these batch render jobs on a cluster.

I haven't yet tried to get tksurfer to render without any display, but I fear that it won't be possible for some OpenGL reason. But if anyone can figure that one out, I would be very grateful.

Don

From: "Darren Weber" dweber@radmail.radiology.ucsf.edu Reply-To: Darren.Weber@radiology.ucsf.edu To: "freesurfer@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu" freesurfer@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu Subject: [Freesurfer] remote batch job? Date: Thu, 16 Aug 2007 16:12:01 -0700

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Hi Bruce et al.,

I want to run a batch job that will use tksurfer to display an inflated surface, load some patches, and rotate and save images. I have a .tcl script to control the process in tksurfer and I have a shell script to start the whole process off for a number of subjects. My question now is how to handle the case where I am working remotely and it is too slow to have the display piped to the remote display, so I want to have either (a) no visible display or (b) a display on the host machine. If I try the usual trick of setting DISPLAY env for the host machine, I'm failing to open the display for any commands sent from the remote xterm.

Do you have a solution for this situation?

Take care, Darren

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Darren L. Weber, Ph.D. Postdoctoral Scholar

Dynamic Neuroimaging Laboratory, UCSF Department of Radiology, 185 Berry Street, Suite 350, Box 0946, San Francisco, CA 94107, USA.

Tel: +1 415 353-9444 Fax: +1 415 353-9421 www: http://dnl.ucsf.edu/users/dweber pgp: http://dnl.ucsf.edu/users/dweber/dweber_pgp.html

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