VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Thu Aug 10 2006 - 11:09:35 CDT

Hi Marc,
  It appears you have some kind of problem with the OpenGL libraries you
linked your build against, since you're getting that warning:
  "Xlib: extension "XFree86-DRI" missing on display ":0.0"."

That seems to indicate to me that you may have inadvertently linked with a
bad OpenGL library or something of that sort. I've heard a number of people
have run into Linux distributions that have out-of-sync 32-bit and 64-bit
OpenGL libraries. Since you didn't include the topmost part of the VMD
startup message I can't tell if you were making a 32-bit or 64-bit build, but
this is something to check. If you have problems with the 64-bit build, try
a 32-bit build and see if you still have problems or not, and vice-versa.
If you're doing the build on a purely 32-bit machine, then it may be that
you've go a rogue libGL.a or libGL.so on your system in a place that your
own compiled binary is linking/finding, but ours is ignoring.

Regarding the advanced OpenGL features:
  We include a vmd/src/GL subdirectory in the VMD source code which
contains a recent copy of the official OpenGL ARB extension header
file sets, which define all of the availble OpenGL extension name strings,
enumerations, and function/entry point names. When you compile VMD from
source, these are used by the VMD OpenGLExtensions.C file to build
function pointer tables and to enable/disable features like GLSL etc
at compile time, and subsequently at runtime. Since we include these
extension headers in the VMD source tree, you shouldn't have to proactively
update your machine's OpenGL headers unless there's a serious problem.
Assuming that the compilation goes well, the feature tests for GLSL
and other advanced rendering methods are compiled into the VMD binary.
>From there, when VMD is run, every single OpenGL extension it uses has
to be availability-tested when the program starts (since you could attach
to a remote display on a machine running an old version of OpenGL!!!),
and those that are found to be available are enabled in VMD, and when
all extensions and features have been enumerated, VMD prints out the
extension summary message at startup. In truth, I don't expect most
VMD users to have any idea what those OpenGL extension messages mean,
but they are VERY VERY VERY helpful to me when I get problem reports
and I'm trying to determine if the problem is with the video/graphics
driver, or with VMD itself.

  John

On Thu, Aug 10, 2006 at 02:21:10PM +0200, Marc Baaden wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I have a question concerning VMD compilation (which does work in principle)
> and the graphics capacities that are available, in particular advanced options
> like programmable shading
>
> With the binary 1.8.5beta version of VMD I get
> [..]
> Info) OpenGL renderer: GeForce FX 5700/AGP/SSE2
> Info) Features: RN MDE CVA MTX PP PS GLSL(OVF)
> Info) Full GLSL rendering mode is available.
> Info) Textures: 2-D (4096x4096), 3-D (512x512x512), Multitexture (4)
> [..]
>
> whereas the version I compiled from the current CVS version only leads to
> [..]
> Xlib: extension "XFree86-DRI" missing on display ":0.0".
> Info) OpenGL renderer: GeForce FX 5700/AGP/SSE2
> Info) Features: RN MTX
> Info) Textures: 2-D (4096x4096), 3-D (512x512x512), Multitexture (4)
> [..]
>
> I guess it has something to do with OpenGL/graphics specific libraries and
> include files, but I am not quite sure which are needed to get the same
> result as in the top listing.
>
> Any comments and suggestions appreciated.
> Thanks in advance,
> Marc
>
> --
> Dr. Marc Baaden - Institut de Biologie Physico-Chimique, Paris
> mailto:baaden_at_smplinux.de - http://www.baaden.ibpc.fr
> FAX: +33 15841 5026 - Tel: +33 15841 5176 ou +33 609 843217
> 

-- 
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