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.