Yes, that would most likely be the problem. Running over VNC requires that all graphics rendering be performed on the remote server, and the resulting image is then sent over the network to the client. This means that the server needs to be equipped with a modern graphics card and have OpenGL 3.3 software drivers loaded. See 2. on this page for details. To get this working will require intervention from the remote server’s administrator, and potentially putting more hardware into the system (i.e. better graphics cards). This may be quite a lot to ask…
The solution I would advocate when you have limited ability to modify these things is to run MRView locally (this is what I do): install MRtrix3 on your local system, and access your data on the remote server using an appropriate networked filesystem, most likely one of:
- Windows Shares (SMB/Samba)
- NFS (if your client is running on MacOSX or Unix/Linux)
- SSHFS (this should always be available, it only requires SSH access - but isn’t available on MacOSX or Windows by default, see here for details).
This does require that your data be made available for access on the remote system using one of these filesystems, but generally NFS & SSH will already be up and running. Hopefully one of these will allow you to get things running…