[Solved] AWS Windows Server 2016/Azure Windows 10 Pro

[JoshuaCall]

Has anyone managed to compile FC 0.19 on AWS workspace Windows 10 desktop experience, powered by Windows Server 2016? I got it to work just fine on my Windows 10 1903 laptop, but it didn't work on AWS Windows 10 destop powered by Windows Server 2016. I'm wondering if anyone would know why that is.

I'm also thinking of trying the BYOL option. Has anyone had success with that?

[JoshuaCall]

Update: I'm having a similar problem when trying to compile in Windows 10 Pro 1903 on a Microsoft Azure cloud instance. The problem is similar, except this is the key difference:

On both operating systems, after I compile and then install and/or copy the the necessary files to the build directory, the FreeCAD splash screen will appear.

On AWS Windows Server 2016, after the splash screen appears and then disappears, a window will open that says something along the lines of "freecad has stopped working" and gives me the option to close or debug.

On Azure Windows 10 Pro, after the splash screen appears and then disappears, nothing else happens.

[JoshuaCall]

I think the problem might be the lack of a GPU on these instances.

[sgrogan]

I think the problem might be the lack of a GPU on these instances.

Maybe this thread offers some clues? https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=36087

You can try launching FreeCAD with the -l switch to get a log in %appdata%/FreeCAD
Or maybe FreeCADcmd -l, that doesn't require a gui at all. You could also try to run the selftests from FreeCADcmd https://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/Start_u ... figuration

Can you get the onboard graphics info? There have been issues with some chipsets with QT5/OpenGL.

If you get this working I'd love to know the details.

[apeltauer]

How are you connected to your windows instance? Via Remote Desktop? In my experience the rdp protocol uses OpenGL 1.4 (or lower) and Qt5.12 needs OpenGL greater then that. So if you try to start Freecad on a remote machine via rdp this will fail.

[JoshuaCall]

How are you connected to your windows instance? Via Remote Desktop?

I connected to the AWS instance via the amazon workspaces client, and I connected to the azure instance via an RDP file.

In my experience the rdp protocol uses OpenGL 1.4 (or lower) and Qt5.12 needs OpenGL greater then that. So if you try to start Freecad on a remote machine via rdp this will fail.

Why would that keep FreeCAD from running at all on the remote desktop? I didn't even see FreeCAD running in the task manager. Also, does that mean that I wouldn't be able to connect to someone else's desktop via Remote Desktop Connection and compile/run FreeCAD 0.19?

[apeltauer]

Compiling works, just starting Freecad won’t work via rdp.
Try to connect to the machine with some other program like teamviewer...

[JoshuaCall]

Alright guys, thanks for your advice. I was actually able to get it working on both AWS and Azure by just downloading an opengl32.dll from https://fdossena.com/?p=mesa/index.frag and then copying the dll to the bin folder. I found the website with the dll on stack overflow.