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Problem:
Image resolution on the workspace is distorted. This can include transparency to the desktop, a black screen or scrambled images.
Solution:
Please ensure that you have installed and updated your hardware graphics drivers. This can be done via the terminal or GUI depending on the graphics card you have. Once you have been able to install or update, run Tecplot again and see if this fixes the issue.
For example, for NVidia graphics card users you can install your drivers with the following terminal command.
sudo apt-get install nvidia-current
Otherwise, a quick Google search will indicate how to install or update your graphics hardware to the latest version.
If the issue persists you can run Tecplot in mesa mode (i.e. ./tecplot360 –mesa). Take note though that mesa is a software 3D library that conforms to the OpenGL API and therefore it is a drop-replacement for OpenGL if native drivers are not available. The downside of using Mesa is that the 3D hardware acceleration provided by the graphics card is not used and therefore rendering is slower. Any transformations or compositing is handled by Mesa in software and then rasterized to the display completely bypassing any hardware acceleration.
Mesa conforms to the OpenGL API, when Tecplot runs it loads the libraries for OpenGL use. If however, you start Tecplot with the -mesa flag Tecplot forgoes loading the OpenGL libraries on the user’s system (be they native or Mesa as just described) and instead use the Mesa OpenGL drivers that we supply with Tecplot.
Since Mesa doesn’t utilize any hardware acceleration it is quite a bit slower than native drivers, especially for large models. This makes Tecplot look slower and doesn’t leverage the expensive graphics hardware on your system. Thus we recommend installing or updating your graphics hardware first and foremost.