awips2-ade Docker container missing fonts

[jskubick]

Not sure whether it's fixed in the repository itself, but the Docker containers at https://hub.docker.com/r/unidata/awips-ade/ appear to have major problems launching (at least, under Windows and non-RHEL Linux).

• I found a fix to get 18.1.1-el6 working (documented below).
• 18.1.1-el7 appears to have a different problem (possibly related to SWT or GTK) that I didn't resolve (but also didn't try to resolve once fixing el6 adequately solved my own immediate problem).
• the version tagged 'latest' (and which gets fetched by default when the tag is omitted) appears to be older than all other versions. It also seemed to have the same (or a similar) problem to the one I observed with 18.1.1-el7.

How to replicate:

• Install Docker Desktop under Windows

• Install an X11 server (like Xming, VcXsrv, MobaXterm, etc)

• fetch the container:

  docker pull unidata/awips-ade:18.1.1-el6

(note: as of 6/27/2019, if you omit the tag and pull the 'latest', it'll actually pull an old version from two years ago)

• launch the X11 server (example assumes your computer's IP address is 192.168.69.100, and you use the default display ID of '0'. You'll probably have to tell the X11 server to disable server access control unless you know how to configure this properly).

• run the Docker container:

  docker run -ti --rm --name=foo -e DISPLAY=192.168.69.100:0 unidata/awips-ade:18.1.1-el6

at this point, if you want to resolve the problem I found with 18.1.1-el6, execute the following from the Docker interactive root shell after running the container:

yum install dejavu-sans-fonts.noarch dejavu-serif-fonts.noarch

Then, proceed within the Docker interactive shell:

su awips
cd /awips2/eclipse
./eclipse

If you've been following these steps and attempted to launch Eclipse from the 18.1.1-el6 container without first executing my fix to install the DejaVU fonts, you'll see the Eclipse splash screen open, then see a corrupted dialog box with empty placeholder rectangles where the characters should be.

If you look at the commandline's output, you'll see "Pango-WARNING **: failed to choose a font, expect ugly output. engine-type='PangoRenderFc', script='common'"