Dolfin plot window comes up solid black

Question

I recently got a new laptop, a Dell XPS 13 Developers Edition, which comes with Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty as the OS. Another possibly relevant aspect is that it has a HiDPI touch screen, 3200 x 1800 pixels.

Of course I installed FEniCS right away. It works fine except for the dolfin plot function. If I try to plot a mesh or a Function, the plot window pops up solid black. No mesh or function to be seen. This happens both with version 1.3 from the Trusty repositories and version 1.5 from the Dolfin PPA.

All other graphic programs seem to work fine. I can run glxgears, paraview, matlab, ipython with matplotlib, etc. Actually even dolfin plot works for plotting an element, like plot(FiniteElement('CG', triangle, 1)).

I have no idea how to debug this. Any ideas?

Answer 1

I've more or less resolved this myself, so this is to record the outcome. The problem was not just with dolfin plotting, but also with other plotting using python VTK, e.g., the python VTK example programs. I updated the laptop from Ubuntu 14.04 to Ubuntu 15.04 and the problem disappeared, so I'm not worrying about it further.