VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Wed Feb 21 2001 - 11:00:57 CST

Hi Tim,
  I listed that URL on the linux releast notes page solely because
they claim to support linux. You are correct that the _glasses_
don't require any special support; however, the _graphics board_
DOES require special support in order to provide the quad-buffered
frame-sequential stereo mode which is used by VMD. I'm guessing
that they have tested their glasses with one of the commercial
vendors' OpenGL card and drivers on Linux, so that they can list
it as supported, but as far as ELSA cards and revelators go,
to my knowledge their cards do not support stereo on Linux at all
yet. (the glasses would be fine, but the cards just don't do it yet).
I believe the stereographics people just tested their glasses with
one of the commercial X/OpenGL vendors drivers with one of the boards
that has hardware stereo support, and called it good. The new FireGL
boards supposedly have real quad-buffered stereo support, although I
don't know if their Linux driver is working yet. There are some
hacks for getting stereo working on GeForce type boards on Windows,
but none of the production drivers are doing real quad-buffered
stereo in OpenGL yet.

We haven't tried any of the low-cost stereo glasses yet, as at present
they all require non-standard coding even on Windows, and to my knowledge
none of them work on Linux yet. There are a couple of commercial companies
that make X implementations for Linux (besides the XFree86), and I believe
a few of them have some level of support for quad-buffered stereo. XFree
still doesn't have stereo support as far as I know, which is why none of
the drivers support it yet. Both XFree and the card-specific drivers will
have to support stereo before VMD can use it.

For commercial Linux X/OpenGL offerings, you may wish to take a look at:
  Metrolink: http://www.metrolink.com/
Xi Graphics: http://www.xig.com/

I suspect that one of those two companies can provide you with the necessary
software to make stereo work on Linux. If you want to use XFree, then you're
probably in for a bit of a wait still, but don't worry, you've got company
a lot of us would like to see XFree do stereo....

  John

On Wed, Feb 21, 2001 at 05:41:56PM +0100, Timm Essigke wrote:
> Dear VMD-L,
>
> on http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/current/linuxrelnotes.html you
> put a link to Stereographics.com as supported stereo glasses for linux.
> As far as I understand they don't need any driver for their glasses
> under linux. How do they work? Have you tested them? What is the
> difference to other glasses on the market? How can VMD set up to work
> with them?
> (I would like to use VMD e.g. with Elsa Relevator glasses and a Nvidia
> Geforce II Ultra card.)
> Any hints, suggestions or can I give up immediately?
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Timm Essigke
> EML Heidelberg 

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349              
  WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/      Fax: 217-244-6078