679. Two common issues with Gaussview on linux

My work computer hasn't had a fresh installation of linux since around 2010 -- I've continously upgraded it to newer versions of debian, and have occasionally moved it to bigger harddrives using dd.

I finally felt there was too much legacy stuff, so I did a fresh installation of debian 12.5, and had to set up gaussian and gaussview again.

Gaussian (16.C01) is pretty straightforward, but gaussview (6.0) was causing issues. Unfortunately I didn't document the error messages.

The causes of either of the two issues were not obvious, to say the least. Based on their causes, these issues should also be quite common.

Issue 1. On start it says "Failed to read fragment file: /opt/gaussian/gv/data/elements/fragments/tet.frg"

Needless to say, the file is there and the permissions are correct.

The source of the issue is (suprisingly) due to the LANG settings. If I do an installation from the live DVD of debian 12.5 and install from a live debian instance, while picking a location other than the US, I get all sorts of fun settings in the /etc/default/locale file. If I boot directly into the installer, I only get the following in the file:

LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
LANGUAGE="en_US:en"

I don't know exactly what is causing the issue, or how to remedy it from an already installed version of debian, but try changing /etc/default/locale to have LANG="en_US.UTF-8" and run locale-gen.

Here's an example of someone else having a similar issue.

Issue 2. gv keeps segfaulting and/or hanging when opening a .chk or .log file.

Gaussview segfaults when opening files (especially .log or .chk), or you get an endless sequence of prompts asking you whether to wait or close gaussview while it's opening the file (and according to top it is doing something).

The cause of the issue was .... nouveau! Or so it seems. Others seem to have had the exact opposite experience.

It worked fine (for me) with either radeon (HD 7870) or nvidia (rtx3050) on two systems.

On a third system (nvidia quadro K620) I started removing nouveau using smxi, but only ran it once. So lsmod doesn't show either nvidia or nouveau as being loaded, while lspci -k|grep -A 3 -i vga shows that nouveau is loaded. Yet gv runs fine now, but not before.

678. Steam and cross-platform play, Linux vs Windows, Halo:MCC and Ghost Recon Wildlands

 I use Linux, my son uses windows. We sometimes want to play computer games together.

We both have Halo: MCC and Ghost Recon Wildlands, and we can't play together in either game without a bit of work.

Halo: MCC

See this post

Basically, copy 

C:\Windows\System32\ucrtbase.dll
C:\Windows\SysWOW64\ucrtbase.dll 

from the windows install, and place them in 

steamapps/compatdata/976730/pfx/drive_c/windows/system32/ 
steamapps/compatdata/976730/pfx/drive_c/windows/syswow64/

on the linux computer.

Ghost Recon Wildlands

Firstly, you need to 'make friends' using the UBIsoft app.

Playing together will then fail with 'Kicked by EAC' for the linux player.
One solution if you're only playing with your friends (which for a game this age probably will be the case anyway), see this video or this post.

In brief, download the Wildlands mod SayNotoEAC from here: page

Go to SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Wildlands\EasyAntiCheat

Make backups of EasyAntiCheat_x86.dll and EasyAntiCheat_x64.dll (e.g. rename them to *.bak)

Copy the two dlls from the downloaded mod

677. Cisco Anyconnect on debian 12.5 -- certificate issues

 If you're getting

"AnyConnect was not able to establish a connection to the specified secure gateway. Please try connecting again."

and

"The certificate on the secure gateway is invalid. A VPN connection will not be established"

when you're using Cisco AnyConnect on Debian 12 and over, it's because of read permissions (you can confirm by running vpnui with gksu)). The solution is given here: Link

In brief, you'll need to edit /opt/cisco/anyconnect/AnyConnectLocalPolicy.xml and change 

<BypassDownloader>false</BypassDownloader><ExcludeFirefoxNSSCertStore>false</ExcludeFirefoxNSSCertStore><ExcludePemFileCertStore>false</ExcludePemFileCertStore>

to

<BypassDownloader>false</BypassDownloader>
<ExcludeFirefoxNSSCertStore>true</ExcludeFirefoxNSSCertStore>

<ExcludePemFileCertStore>false</ExcludePemFileCertStore>