Hey guys,
We got our shiny new Win11 laptops a few months ago, and I had another go at getting rvu and ximage running on WSL2.
I did attempt to do this on our old Win10 laptops, but never managed to get Radiance’s X11 apps to work, despite spending countless hours.
With WSL2 to on Win11, this has now become a whole lot easier. The short story is: “It just works”. No, it really does! Almost.
Since we use Alma LINUX on our LINUX servers, I also went for Alma as my WSL2 distro. After installing Radiance and trying to run ximage, I got this error msg:
$ ximage nice.hdr
X Error of failed request: BadName (named color or font does not exist)
Major opcode of failed request: 45 (X_OpenFont)
Serial number of failed request: 23
Current serial number in output stream: 37
A bit of googling revealed that the font issue could be resolved by installing xorg-x11-fonts-misc-7.5-33.el9.noarch on my Alma WSL2 distro. A very similar or identical install should make this work also in related distros, namely RHEL, Fedora, Rocky.
I’m not entirely sure what the equivalent DEB package would be on Debian, Ubuntu etc.
I am not repeating here how to install Radiance, nor the importance of setting the RAYPATH variable, and adding the Radiance bin/ folder to PATH. All this has been discussed elsewhere.
My first impressions of using rvu via WSL2 are mixed. Yes, running rvu it with -n will/might speed it up, but the speed-up is nowhere near linear (and, obviously, limited by the actual core count of your computer). It also seems to depend you our -a* settings, but this might be Radiance thing, since rvu is not really meant to work it high ambient settings – it a ‘preview thing’.
Yet, it is happy days as far as Radiance users on Win11 users are concerned. WSL2 finally gives us a no-sweat option of making Radiance X11 apps run transparently on a Windows machine. Thank you, Santa!
Merry Xmas to you all
Axel