COMSOL in VNC environment (linux server)

According to this thread, COMSOL is not compatible with remote access. When started in the VNC window, it complaints against "Could not initialize 3D graphics" and "Could  not initialize 3D renderer". The problem could be caused by installed nvidia proprietary graphics libraries  (used for CUDA computation).

Solution is to set the  environment variable USEMESA=1 and start comsol with the command:

server:~> USEMESA=1 comsol 

Alternatively, the value 1 can be specified directly in the comsol startup script.
Tested on v4.3a, v4.4, v5.1.