Generate Stimulus without a monitor over SSH in VS Code

Coding
1

Hi,

I would like to use the grating stim module to generate a drifting grating that is masked by gabors. I can do this locally without issue however my development environment is primarily in VS Code over SSH. When I try to simply import the visual module I get the error:

NoSuchDisplayException: Cannot connect to “None”

I don’t plan to use a window to view the stimulus remotely, rather my intention is to export the frames to a video file using getMovieFrame

Running on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS python3.11.

2

A few suggestions:

  1. Xvfb trick it into thinking there is an xserver
  2. if the remote system has X, ssh from remote to local
    with ssh -Y -c
  3. use a variant of VNC

I need a bit more info on your setup.

3

Hi Ben,

Thanks for your suggestions. What else do you need to know about my setup?

I’ve tried but not had much luck with xvfb to initialize a display.

I should have X but I cannot use that shh command to connect through vscode.

VNC is off-limits to me, I have to do a jump in order to reach my development machine.

After some further tinkering, pyvirtualdisplay seems to the be answer to get this to work I don’t have saveMovieFrames working quite yet however this is enough to enable imports of the visual module to work.