Accessing an OpenGL GUI through X11 forwarding

Question

I want to use Bullet Physics' pybullet python library to create and work with a GUI window. Thing is, I'm running a python interpreter through SSH from a remote server.

Now, I can access most GUI windows through X11 forwarding (all the matplotlib plots successfully forward their graphical content to my local machine). However, for some reason, the OpenGL-based window that should open up when I use import pybullet as p; p.connect(p.GUI) fails to execute and I get the following error report before the kernel dies:

pybullet build time: Aug 14 2017 11:46:39
startThreads creating 1 threads.
starting thread 0
started thread 0 
argc=4
argv[0] = unused
argv[1] = 
argv[2] = --logtostderr
argv[3] = --start_demo_name=Physics Server
ExampleBrowserThreadFunc started
X11 functions dynamically loaded using dlopen/dlsym OK!
glewXInit dynamically loaded using dlopen/dlsym OK
glewXInit OK
Failed to retrieve a framebuffer config

The GUI pops up perfectly fine if I execute it locally from my remote machine, so the problem is not with pybullet.

Has someone come across this problem before?

Answer 1

By default, PyBullet uses OpenGL 3.x

Try using

import pybullet as p p.connect(p.GUI, options="--opengl2")

It is not fully featured, but may give you some kind of view.