VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Fri May 13 2005 - 02:30:27 CDT

Dallas,
  In your specific case with those ATI drivers, I think we had
actually narrowed down the problem to something involving the
OpenGL initialization, where VMD acquires an X11 window and gets
a GLX context supporting various features. I think the problem with
the ATI driver was something about that initial setup. If so, we can
probably figure out what it actually is with just a bit more testing.
Once I know what's killing you on that ATI card, I may be able to
add a workaround specifically to avoid your problem, without giving
up any of the other features. I won't have time to do this for a few
days, but sometime around May 20 or so I think I can delve into this
deeper if you're game for trying a bunch of VMD binaries for me :-)

  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Fri, May 13, 2005 at 05:07:05PM +1000, Dallas B. Warren wrote:
> John,
>
> > Dallas, are you using ATI or NVidia? I seem to remember you
> > had an ATI laptop chipset or something? Just trying to
> > remember what your specific case is.
>
> Yeah, ATI. Wont be getting one of them again. Stupid drivers for
> Linux.... ;-)
>
> Issue currently is I decided to upgrade to RHEL 4, was using RHEL 3.
> RHEL used XFree86 and I had an ATI driver that worked with VMD fine.
> Something like the three most recent ATI drivers didn't work, but I had
> one that did, so not too much of an issue there.
>
> Anyway, with RHEL 4, they have swapped to Xorg. And ATI only has the
> last three Xorg drivers available, all of which VMD crashes with. And I
> believe even if they were available before that, someone told me that
> there is some major problems for the older ATI Xorg versions or
> something to that effect.
>
> So that leaves me with the option of installing XFree86 and the
> appropriate ATI driver that I know works, to get all the features. Or
> hang with how things are currently and wait for the next version to come
> out which hopefully will fix the problem.
>
> Was just asking what was missing to see if it actually impacted what I
> do with VMD for the most part. From what I can tell, not too much for
> the general just having a look to see what is happening type of things.
> With image generation etc may be an issue, but don't' have to do that
> for awhile.
>
> Haven't yet submitted a bug at ATI for this particular one, but have for
> the last three or so that I have encountered.....
>
> Catch ya,
>
> Dr. Dallas Warren
> Lecturer
> Department of Pharmaceutical Biology and Pharmacology
> Victorian College of Pharmacy, Monash University
> 381 Royal Parade, Parkville VIC 3010
> dallas.warren_at_vcp.monash.edu.au
> +61 3 9903 9073
> ---------------------------------
> When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble
> a nail. 

-- 
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