Help! Flame won’t start

Has anyone seen this error? I rebooted and Flame will not start. 2025.1 Linux

Also, as it’s Labor Day season n the US, I’d like to find an IT guy for support today somewhere in the world…. Any ideas?

How are you starting the app? Icon? Command line?

With icon.
@marcwellington saved the day

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In case someone has the same problem in the future and searches for the error message:

This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

What did @marcwellington do?

-Ted

See the output in terminal= echo $DISPLAY

after, in terminal:

sudo nano /opt/Autodesk/cfg/env.cfg

and and change the value to match the result of “echo $DISPLAY”

if the value is 0 change and $DISPLAY is 1 so change to 1 or if 1 change and $DISPALY is 0 so change to to 0.

Don’t forget about our good friend :100

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You can change this in the setup tool now under Environment Variables. No need to use the freaking terminal anymore for this one.

Here is how I helped for Linux in GP’s case.

  1. open Setup
  2. make sure the DISPLAY variable is set to :0
  3. click Apply
  4. click Reload
  5. Restart all the services in the service manager. (This was required for GP’s machine. It doesn’t not need to be done on mine.)
  6. Load flame.

We had to load a clean test project first. Then, open the one that crashed when he tried to remove the variable all together.

Hope this helps.

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@marcwellington - did you manage to isolate why the display variable was not set correctly?

Nope.

for our infrastructure, to seamlessly move between local/teradici/burn, we just delete the DISPLAY variable and everything works happily.

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GP tried that prior to me helping him out, but unfortunately it caused Flame to locked up when trying to start it.

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@marcwellington - one of the admirable aspects of Alan’s masterpiece of engineering is just how thoughtfully he makes all of the systems redundant. Obviously this only works at scale bigger than one workstation - but it’s a thing of beauty to know that if a gremlin really did manage to creep in, you just move to another workstation, wipe the offending system and once it’s rebuilt, you carry on as if nothing happened - it’s an elegant and brilliant solution, even if i believe in a fundamentally different approach.

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From the small perusal I have given Alan’s system, it seems to have a lot of benefits for a single workstation as well. If I’m correct in understanding, and I’m certain he will correct me if I’m wrong, in the event a a full workstation meltdown, the job can be up an running again once the local hardware is fixed or replaced, without having to rebuild users and unarchive projects.

I totally agree and appreciate Alan’s genius. I was just sharing how GP’s situation turned out.

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correct… the workstations become dumb compute nodes with NO, ZERO, NADA data on them. They can catch one fire, you move to the next desk, and get back to work. All data is stored on servers with differing level of redundancy. And as exampled by GPs issue on a holiday, it benefits even a single workstation.

Flame Data Island is a legacy workflow that needs to DIE.

@ytf - There is more than one way to yield this kind of redundancy.
The instinctual way works extraordinarily well for Instinctual and could be applied in many other scenarios, where Alan’s architectural approach would be very appropriate.
There are other instances where it is not possible or pragmatic to implement.
That does not mean it’s wrong - it’s just different, and very much best of breed different.

I want to thank Marc, Alan, Phil and Jack for stepping up in my holiday crisis. It was the most logistically and temporally intense job of my career, for my biggest client, the middle of it falling on a holiday, while folks in 5 cities and 3 continents were waiting for my work — and my Flame would not start. I had a series of minor heart attacks.

Thank you for saving me from losing my shit and my client.

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I think the bigger questions are:

• Why did my Flame crash on its own in the middle of the night?

• Why did that crash prevent Flame from opening?

• Why did it take this kind of background, user-unfriendly hacks, to pull it off?

@fredwarren ? Anyone?

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As an aside, why, when I tried to contact ADSK during the crisis, which was not a holiday in Canada, using the only means I’m aware of to contact support through the site, “View support cases,” I was delivered this page:

image

Is there any viable support for Flame from Autodesk at this point at all?

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