Frequently asked questions
This page attempts to answer the most common questions asked on the LabRPS forums. If you have a problem or question regarding LabRPS, check below first. Then, if you cannot find an answer for your specific question, head to the LabRPS forum!
Installation
What is the easiest way to install LabRPS on my system?
If you are on Windows or macOS, the simplest way is to head to the Download page, where you'll find several ready-to-install packages. If you are on Debian, Fedora or Ubuntu and some other distributions, LabRPS is already included in the standard software repositories and you can simply install it with the software manager. On Ubuntu, the LabRPS team also maintains its own PPA repositories. For further details about installation, refer to the installing page for your operating system (Windows, Linux or Mac).
What are the prerequisites for running LabRPS?
In contrast to most scientific software, LabRPS can run smoothly on the most modest computers - it's been known to run on Pentium IV and Intel Core2 Solo CPUs. If your computer is running a current operating system, chances are LabRPS will run. The only prerequisite is that your graphics card or chipset must support OpenGL, preferably no older than v2.0. In case of problems, refer to the Troubleshooting section of this FAQ.
Multithreading
LabRPS's underlying geometric modeling kernel, the OpenCASCADE Technology (OCCT) third-party library, has only partial multi-threading support at this time. See the multithreading page for more details.
For Mac users
Only the MacIntel architecture is supported. There are no builds available for the PowerPC architecture.
What if I want to compile LabRPS myself?
The source code of LabRPS is always available in the project source code repository. Compiling LabRPS yourself allows you to use the most recent features being developed, but requires a bit of computer knowledge, although the procedure is fairly simple. Access to the source code is explained here, and we have detailed instructions for compiling on Windows, Linux and macOS.
LabRPS tells me some module or application is missing
LabRPS depends on a lot of things to offer all its functionality. All the main required components are usually bundled within your LabRPS installation or provided by your package manager, so normally you have nothing to worry about. If you installed LabRPS from unofficial sources, however, or compiled LabRPS yourself, some piece might be missing, which is not critical to LabRPS itself, but might cause some functionality to be unavailable. Some specific file formats such as Collada or DWG also require extra components, which cannot be bundled into LabRPS, and must be installed by yourself separately.
All those components and the appropriate way to install them are listed on the Extra python modules page.
Troubleshooting
LabRPS doesn't start at all
There might be a lot of reasons for that, the most likely is that some library is missing. Try starting LabRPS from a terminal (type labrps at a terminal prompt, LabRPS on some systems) to see if some error message appears. Also, read the rest of this FAQ as it can give you more clues to detect the cause of the problem. If nothing helps, tell about it on the [1], there will surely be someone who can help.
On some older Windows XP systems you may get an error message like this: The application can't start, because the side-by-side configuration is wrong. The reinstallation of the application may solve the problem. The reason for this problem is that on your system either the CRT runtime libraries are missing or the version installed is too old because LabRPS was linked against a newer version. In this case you have to install the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable Package which you'll find at Microsoft. See also the corresponding forum message.
LabRPS crashes on startup
A crash might indicate a more serious bug, or some problem in your configuration. Most startup crashes occur because of one of the two following reasons:
OpenGL drivers are not installed, or not working properly
This is a very common cause of the problem. The symptoms are simply that LabRPS crashes at startup, or whenever you open a 3D view (for example by creating a new document). Try to find out what your graphic chip is, then find out if it supports OpenGL (most recent chips do), then find the correct driver and install it. A good way to doublecheck if OpenGL is available is to try to run another OpenGL application such as blender.
And as a general tip to get some more information about crashes with LabRPS you can start it with the program parameter --write-log. This will create the file LabRPS.log in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/LabRPS (version 0.20 and above) or $HOME/.LabRPS (version 0.19 and below) on Linux, or $HOME/Library/Preferences/LabRPS on macOS, or %APPDATA%/LabRPS on Windows systems.
In some rare cases you may have a graphic driver installed that doesn't fit to your graphic card. We had a case where the user's laptop had an Intel on-board graphic but some ATI drivers were installed. [2] After removing the files and re-installing the correct driver LabRPS started to work.
Some library, needed by LabRPS, is not present on your system, or wasn't found by LabRPS
There can be two paths to this problem: either some library is simply missing, therefore LabRPS will refuse to start, or the library is there, but it is an older version than the one LabRPS expects, so a crash will occur when LabRPS attempts to use a missing feature from that library. A common example is when you have Qt3 and Qt4 installed on your system, LabRPS might detect Qt4 but if your Qt installation is not properly configured, some pieces of Qt3 might still be used, provoking crashes.
Please review the installing procedure (Windows, Linux or Mac), make sure you installed all the required libraries (on most linux systems this is done automatically), and check what is the minimum version number for each of the components.
If everything seems correct, describe the problem on the forum or submit a bug. If you are on a linux system, it is easy to do a debug backtrace, which provides very useful information about the crash to the developers:
- in a terminal, type: gdb labrps (assuming package gdb is installed)
- inside gdb, type run
- after the crash, type bt to get the backtrace, that you can include in your bug report.
LabRPS freezes after startup
When starting LabRPS the GUI appears almost immediately but the GUI is frozen and the cpu is about 99%. This can happen on the KDE desktop when using the Oxygen theme. That's a bug in the Oxygen theme and choosing another theme should fix this issue.
Using LabRPS
Is LabRPS really free? Even for commercial use?
LabRPS is open-source software, and is free not only to use, for yourself or for doing commercial work, but also to distribute, modify, or even use in a closed-source application. To summarize, you are free to do (almost) anything you want with it. See the Licence page for more details.
What can I do with LabRPS? Where do I start?
Head to the Getting started page for a quick description of the tools you can use. There is also a new Tutorials section containing a few resources. The User hub section contains more detailed information about the different workbenches of LabRPS. Note that since LabRPS is relatively new, its user interface is still very bare and doesn't feature many tools. But much more advanced functionality is already available to you from Python scripting.
Is there documentation for newcomers? How can I learn to use LabRPS?
There is a lot of documentation spread in different places, both on and outside the LabRPS website. You might want to start with the Getting started page. The Tutorials section contains many specialized tutorial pages to help you getting started with the different workbenches. The Manual:Introduction is a general, complete user-oriented guide to LabRPS. The User hub section of this wiki lists all pages aimed at end users. On external sites like Youtube, you will also find a load of video tutorials created by users. And, last but not least, the forum contains a lot of replies to questions asked by other newcomers.
I want to import/export data in format XYZ to/from LabRPS. How do I do that?
Please refer to the LabRPS Howto Import Export page. Maybe your questions are already answered there.
Where can I find workarounds for features that LabRPS currently does not support?
Please refer to the Workarounds page.
Contributing to LabRPS
LabRPS is such a great program! How can I help?
There are a lot of different ways to help, even if you are not a programmer. Here are a couple of things you can do:
- Give some feedback to the LabRPS developers: It is always useful to know what people think, what they found good, what they miss, etc. Drop a note on the forum giving your opinion or make a request on our issue tracker!
- Help with writing documentation: The documentation we have here on this site is sometimes very limited. If you discovered something that is not well documented, add your knowledge there!
- Help others newcomers: Hang around the forum, and help new people to solve basic questions, like how do I install, how do I add a cube, etc.
- Write Tutorials, or record video tutorials: Tutorials are a very easy way for newcomers to learn a new software. If you did some nice stuff, why not show other people how to do it?
- Contribute with assets and examples: We are still missing good example files in LabRPS. If you created something good, share it with us!
- Submit bugs: It is very important to have all possible bugs fixed. If you find one, report it as clearly as possible, so we can understand exactly what's happening.
- Try to do some Python coding: You never programmed before but you want to try? Python is easy. Read our introduction to Python, but beware, you might get addicted quickly!
- See the Help LabRPS page for more details on how to contribute.
How can I get edit permission on the wiki?
See the Work on the documentation page paragraph for more details on how to contribute.
Licensing, copying and reuse
Do I have to pay something to use LabRPS?
No. LabRPS is totally free to use, to download, to redistribute, or to modify. It is open-source software, published under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License 2.1, which guarantees you those freedoms and, even more important, guarantees you that these freedoms will never be taken from you.
Can I reuse any part of the LabRPS artwork or pieces of the website?
Sure. All the artwork (icons, banners, etc.) of LabRPS are licensed LGPL, same as the LabRPS code. Help yourself on the Artwork page. The website is a standard MediaWiki site, all graphic elements can freely be reused, and if you are curious about how to tweak the MediaWiki software like we did, look for the special Common css and js pages.
Can I reuse pieces of LabRPS in another application?
Yes, you can use the core parts of LabRPS in other applications as long as you comply with the terms of the LGPL. Third party libraries, external workbenches, and macros may be subject to their own license terms, so please consult with their authors. More details on the Licence page.
User documentation
- Getting started
- Installation: Download, Windows, Linux, Mac, Additional components, AppImage
- Basics: About LabRPS, Interface, RPS Objects, Object name, Preferences, Workbenches, Document structure, Properties, Help LabRPS, Donate
- Help: Tutorials, Video tutorials
- Workbenches: Std Base, WindLab, SeismicLab, SeaLab, UserLab, Spreadsheet, Plot, Web
- Hubs: User hub, Power users hub, Developer hub