Headless mode about gource HOT 15 OPEN

I agree. I was irritated and thought the piping was broken, because I expect an 
app
not to show a window if I pipe the visual output somewhere else :)

Hi. I'm not sure if this is possible with OpenGL/SDL. I know you can create a
framebuffer object in OpenGL, but normally you have already initialized a 
display
context with a window before hand.

If someone pointed me to something that does this (hardware accelerated opengl
without creating a window) I will have a look.

And hence, would the lack of OpenGL hardware produce this kind of abort?

(gdb) where
#0  0x0000003f1c832bf8 in SDL_GL_SetAttribute ()
   from /usr/lib64/libSDL-1.2.so.0
#1  0x000000000040bfdb in SDLAppDisplay::init (this=0x64d1a0, 
    window_title=..., width=1024, height=768, fullscreen=<value optimized out>)
    at src/core/display.cpp:86
#2  0x0000000000431e48 in main (argc=<value optimized out>, 
    argv=<value optimized out>) at src/main.cpp:640

Did it segfault? What version on what platform?

If possible could edit src/core/display.cpp to check the return code from 
SDL_Init. eg:

if(SDL_Init(SDL_INIT_TIMER | SDL_INIT_VIDEO) != 0) {
   throw SDLInitException(SDL_GetError());
}

I should really be checking that so it can die gracefully.

Cheers

Andrew

[deleted comment]

I'm pretty sure that's the problem. I will change it to do the check above.

$ gource --help | head
Gource v0.26b
Usage: gource [OPTIONS] [PATH]

$ uname -a
Linux chris 2.6.18-164.6.1.el5xen #1 SMP Tue Nov 3 16:48:13 EST 2009 x86_64 
x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

$ cat /etc/redhat-release
CentOS release 5.5 (Final)

Hope the above answers your questions on version and platform.  If not, let me 
know what else you'd like to see.  I'll give the patch a try and report back.

Hmm, that generates a compile error.  I'm not a C++ programmer, so it's not 
immediately obvious to me what's wrong, but I'm thinking maybe the thrown error 
function argument is of the wrong type:

src/core/display.cpp: In member function ‘void 
SDLAppDisplay::init(std::string, int, int, bool)’:
src/core/display.cpp:85: error: no matching function for call to 
‘SDLInitException::SDLInitException(char*)’
src/core/display.h:51: note: candidates are: 
SDLInitException::SDLInitException(std::string&)
src/core/display.h:47: note:                 
SDLInitException::SDLInitException(const SDLInitException&)
make: *** [src/core/display.o] Error 1

If you edit display.h and change:
 SDLInitException(std::string& error) : error(error) {
to:
 SDLInitException(const std::string& error) : error(error) {

It should compile. I changed that since 0.26b.

I confirmed it was crashing due to not checking the return value of SDL_Init(), 
so thanks for your report. Your still going to need a video card to use Gource, 
however.

Yup, understand that.  Moved my efforts down to my laptop from the server.  :-)

I'm not sure if this is still an issue or not, but I have figured out how to 
run it headless.  I am using a fresh install of Ubuntu Server 11.04 x64 in a 
virtual machine.  This worked for me, but your mileage may vary.

$ gource --help | head -n 1
Gource v0.28

$ uname -a
Linux ubuntu 2.6.38-11-generic #50-Ubuntu SMP Mon Sep 12 21:18:14 UTC 2011 i686 
i686 i386 GNU/Linux

The first step is to install all the necessary packages:
$ apt-get install git xvfb xfonts-base xfonts-75dpi xfonts-100dpi 
xfonts-cyrillic gource ffmpeg libavcodec-extra-52

After that, simply run something along the lines of:
$ xvfb-run -a -s "-screen 0 1280x720x24" gource -1280x720 -r 30 -o ../test.ppm

A full-blown gource -> ffmpeg example:
$ xvfb-run -a -s "-screen 0 1280x720x24" gource -1280x720 -r 30 -o - | ffmpeg 
-y -b 10000K -r 30 -f image2pipe -vcodec ppm -i - ../test.mov

I hope this helps!

Thanks for the tip.

Perhaps adding this to the documentation as how to run headless would be 
adequate to close this bug?

The proposed solution currently targets linux only.
Is there a solution for windows?

+1 for a request for a headless Windows solution
https://code.google.com/p/gource/issues/detail?id=29#c14