TkAgg backend issue

[jlstevens]

This conversation has been moved from the inline comments on commit 5f28a33

chris-english commented on 5f28a33 12 days ago

Very happy to explore your Dataviews Tutorial. Imagining really, really new to, well everything, python, linux, topographica, but a burning desire to get one's head around topographica and its many worthy parts some things can go wrong for the uninitiated (like myself, and soon my students...).

My first issues were with modules not found (dataviews), and fixed through appending sys.path for dataviews and param.
That said, in the section - SheetViews, the default backend selected is backend_tkagg.py, which leads to TclError: couldn't connect to display ":0". The sinusoid data is printed but not visualized. Putting %matplotlib inline, in a cell prior to plotting means all your work can be seen by us nubes.
Thanks for your documenting efforts.
Chris English

[jlstevens]

jlstevens commented on 5f28a33 12 days ago

Hi

If the IPython extension is working properly, you shouldn't be needing matplotlib inline. My first recommendation (as you are using Topographica) is to launch the notebooks with:

topographica -n

This should help get everything configured for you properly. If that doesn't work, try:

from dataviews import ipython

And see if there is a traceback - if there is, please post here so we can find the problem!

Jean-Luc

[jlstevens]

chris-english commented on 5f28a33 11 days ago

./topograpica -n (path-to-file) works fine and as intended.

My problem came up due to starting notebook in commandline with: ipython notebook, then selecting Dataviews_Tutorial.ipynb through the check here optioninto the kernel tree and thus my instance didn't have the benefits of sys, external, topo or parsing command line arguments provided by ./topographica.
when in doubt, try to follow the directions.chris

[jlstevens]

Sounds like using topographica -n resolved the issue!

I am still wondering about the exception you mentioned in your original post. After setting the sys.pathappropriately you should not have seen the error TclError: couldn't connect to display ":0" unless you were running ipython notebook remotely (and on a server without a display set).

As long as you are using topographica, you should be fine. If you do see this error again, please do tell us so we can figure out how to switch the matplotlib backend to 'Agg' correctly to fix the issue.

I'll close the issue for now but if you have any more of these problems, I'm happy to reopen it.

Jean-Luc

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