Help Troubleshooting Blender launch failure

English Applications
#1

It has been ages since I’ve run a Linux system, but up till now the auto-magical miracle that is YaST has done pretty much everything for me without trouble, allowing me to get stuff done while still wallowing in blissful ignorance.

It was fun while it lasted, but now despite YaST telling me that Blender, Blender Languages, and Blender Cycles Headers packages are installed from the official 15.1 LEAP repositories, I can’t get Blender to run. GIMP, Inkscape, Firefox, and LibreOffice are all running fine for me, so it appears to be Blender specific and not a general problem with applications.

I tried in the start menu, Applications/Graphics/Blender where Blender shows up under both Blender Template and 3D Modeller icons. Click the icon for either one and for a fraction of a second something appears in the task bar before closing again.

I figured I’d wander through foggy memories of how Linux file structures usually work, and was hoping to find an executable in Root/usr/bin and found blender and blenderplayer which showed as shared libraries, and blender-sample and blender-softwaregl which show as executable, and blender-thumbnailer.py. Results are no different than from start menu.

Hardware wise:
Ryzen 7 3700x
32 GB 3200 MHz RAM
Nvidia RTX 2070 Super Driver Version 440.31 according to Nvidia X Server (Nvidia proprietary drivers from community repositories)
Samsung boot and storage SSDs, which I believe I formatted in BTRFS.

Note that although as far as I know I have the correct Nvidia drivers installed I’m not sure I’ve actually used any programs that use 3D acceleration yet. While I was looking in the Nvidia X server panel I did set it to prefer performance so It could run faster than 300 MHz, but trying Blender after that change didn’t produce any positive results.

Blender is installed on the Linux boot drive, so I don’t think there should be any problems with looking for bits of it in the wrong directories?

I tried uninstalling and reinstalling with YaST, I also tried the openSUSE downloads pages and tried “Direct install” for LEAP 15.1. I also checked Info Center and it seems to think that indeed I am running LEAP 15.1

My chief problem is that after having done a few searches for variations of “Blender not launching” I didn’t come up with any likely suspects, and my Linux skills are so rusty that I’m not sure where to go from here in terms of troubleshooting.

#2

Start it on a command line and report any error message.

#3

Ah, thanks for the next step.
Here’s what I put into and got out of terminal


[username]:/usr/bin> blender
Received X11 Error:
               error code: 2
               request code:  151
               minor code:    34
               error text:  BadValue  ( integer parameter out of range for operation )
Writing: /tmp/blender.crash.txt
Segmentation fault ( core dumped )

Digging around I did also find the crash txt

Blender 2.79 (sub 0), Unknown revision

backtrace

blender(BLI_system_backtrace+0x33) [0x5564821e2213]
blender(+0xaf6263) [0x556481800263]
/lib64/libc.so.6(+0x361e0) [0x7efeeb1ab1e0]
blender(GHOST_GetDPIHint+0) [0x5564821fd190]
blender(WM_window_set_dpi+0x12) [0x55648181f452]
blender(ED_screen_refresh+0xe9) [0x556481afc4d9]
blender(ED_screens_initialize+0x2b) [0x556481afcb1b]
blender(WM_check+0x68) [0x556481800c08]
blender(wm_homefile_read+0x311) [0x55648180da61]
blender(WM_init+0xf0) [0x5564818100d0]
blender(main+0x246) [0x5564817e3986]
/lib64/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xea) [0x7efeeb195f8a]
blender(_start+0x2a) [0x5564817fcf3a]

#4

SOLVED!

After getting the terminal results I knew just enough to figure that X11 was unhappy about something and therefore not cooperating with the whole drawing pixels thing.

So I opened up the Nvidia X Server control panel, and also already had YaST open because I wanted to check and make sure that I really had a driver that supported the 2070S.

Having both windows open, I noticed something funny. The control panel said driver version 440.31, while Yast said driver version 440.44. I think that the culprit was a driver update without a reboot, so that when something read “look for this” from the old configuration what it found was the new version, of which the name of course did not match, and naturally being a computer it completely gave up at that point.

At any rate, I rebooted. Now both Yast and the Nvidia X Server panel agree that the driver version is 440.44, and Blender works.

Hurrah!

Thanks for the suggestion to use terminal to get error messages. The error message aimed my suspicions in the right general direction. I think I succeeded on luck more than skill or knowledge, but I’ll take the win for now.