No 3d graphics with sage 9.8 using conda-forge

edit

I can reproduce with

• SageMath 9.8 from conda-forge in Ubuntu 22.04
• Firefox installed as a "snap"

What happens is:

• SageMath saves the image to some html file in /tmp then asks your browser to open it
• Firefox installed as a snap is set not to open files in /tmp

Three ways around this (including the one suggested by @John Palmieri):

• either reinstall Firefox not as a "snap", which might help, see:
  • Mozilla support forum question 1377872
• or run Sage with the TMPDIR environment variable set to some directory inside your home directory
• or, as a workaround, manually save 3d graphics to html file, then open obtained file in browser

Example.

If Firefox is installed using apt install firefox, it might have been installed as a "snap":

$ dpkg-query --list firefox
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name           Version           Architecture Description
+++-==============-=================-============-==============================================
ii  firefox        1:1snap1-0ubuntu2 amd64        Transitional package - firefox -> firefox snap

$ snap list | grep firefox
firefox              112.0.2-1                   2605   latest/stable/…  mozilla**       -

Here is what happens in that situation.

Start Sage:

$ conda activate sage
$ sage
SageMath version 9.8, released 2023-02-11. Python 3.10.8.

Declare "symbolic ring" variables, define plot, and try to view it

sage: x, y = SR.var('x, y')
sage: p = plot3d(x*y^3, (-1, 1), (-1, 1))
sage: p

For me this launches a Firefox tab which tries to access a temporary file and complains:

File not found

Firefox can’t find the file at /tmp/tmp58e2me0a/tmp_68ciixtz.html.

• Check the file name for capitalization or other typing errors.
• Check to see if the file was moved, renamed or deleted.

The problem is that Firefox installed as a "snap" is set not to open files in /tmp.

Things work if Sage starts with TMPDIR set to a subdirectory of the user's home directory.

I created a tmp directory in my home directory:

$ mkdir -p $HOME/tmp

Then things work if I start Sage with this command:

$ TMPDIR=$HOME/tmp sage

or with these two commands:

$ export TMPDIR=$HOME/tmp
$ sage

The "export" command can be included in a file that is run each time a shell is started. For example,~/.bashrc if using bash, or ~/.zshrc if using zsh.

If Sage was started without setting TMPDIR, we can save the plot to an html file and open that file:

sage: p.save("myplot.html")
sage: !open myplot.html

That works well for me.

Would the solution at https://ask.sagemath.org/question/641... help? That is, set TMPDIR so that files are saved in a directory that Firefox can actually access?