Error message when trying to get PETSc to draw to an X terminal by passing -mat_view_draw

Question

I've made a matrix, and now I want to draw it on the screen to make a basic check of correctness. The documentation for MatAssemblyEnd() states that I can pass an option to do this:

-mat_view_draw - PetscDraws nonzero structure of matrix, using MatView() and PetscDrawOpenX().

But when I run my program with this option, I get the following error:

[0]PETSC ERROR: --------------------- Error Message ------------------------------------
[0]PETSC ERROR: No support for this operation for this object type!
[0]PETSC ERROR: Viewer type draw not supported!
[0]PETSC ERROR: ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Does PETSc still support drawing to X terminals? Or is this just an indication of a bug somewhere in my code?

Answer 1

Configure probably did not find X11. You can check whether it was found using

$ grep '\<PETSC_HAVE_X\>' $PETSC_DIR/$PETSC_ARCH/include/petscconf.h 
#ifndef PETSC_HAVE_X
#define PETSC_HAVE_X 1

If you don't see PETSC_HAVE_X defined, try reconfiguring --with-x (perhaps with a path, see ./configure --help for details on what to specify).