Julia VegaLite and ElectronDisplay - controlling sandboxing?

General Usage
1

I’m using Julia 1.9.3 on WSL2 Ubuntu Linux, working through the REPL (actually through Emacs Julia-Snail, but the plotting commands are sent to the REPL). So wanted to try out ElectronDisplay for VegaLite.

using DataFrames
using VegaLite, VegaDatasets
using ElectronDisplay

dataset("cars") |>
    @vlplot(
        :point,
        x=:Horsepower,
        y=:Miles_per_Gallon,
        color=:Origin,
        width=400,
        height=400
    )

I get

FATAL:gpu_data_manager_impl_private.cc(439)] GPU process isn’t usable. Goodbye.

I think this is not Julia-specific, but I’ve read that using a --no-sandbox option is often the solution to this problem. Is there a way to control such an option with Julia?

Alternatively, I could view the figures in a browser. The plotting command above (without using Electron Display) generates the html file in /tmp/ - what command or environment variable is VegaLite/Julia looking for to automatically open this file - I imagine I can set it in my .bashrc?

2

I’m not sure whether ElectronDisplay can work when run on WSL… The electron process would be running inside the WSL virtual machine, and would then need the ability to display a UI etc. Maybe that could work with the relatively new gWSL or whatever that is… Have you tried to run other GUI programs in WSL and whether that works? That might be a good first start.

We could certainly add that. https://github.com/davidanthoff/Electron.jl/blob/master/src/Electron.jl#L133 provides the ability to add additional command line args, but we would have to modify ElectronDisplay.jl to actually use/expose that.

That logic is here, so I think on WSL that would essentially depend on what xdg-open does.

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3

Thanks for the answer. It seems like running an electron app on WSL2 is possible with installation of additional libraries (using X11 for the GUI - I’m using X410 but gWSL might be better), but I could not get it to work so I leave that for another day.

However, I can now view the output figures in the browser by specifying an appropriate program for xdg-open. Thanks for pointing me to that. On an Ubuntu Linux instance, the following worked for me and now the plot pops up in the Windows default browser.

$ sudo apt install wslu 
$ xdg-mime default wslview.desktop text/html
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