VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Wed Sep 06 2006 - 15:10:46 CDT

Hi Dan,
  I've already ported VMD and the VMD plugins themselves
to Windows XP x64 (64-bit version) back in February 2006,
however it is not yet usable as there is presently not a working
port of Tcl/Tk for 64-bit Windows XP yet.

It is apparently possible to build a 64-bit Tcl/Tk on Windows Server 2003
with some older compilers (which we don't have), but not with MSVS 2005 which
is the compiler version required for access to things like 64-bit OpenGL etc.

I have hacked (and I do mean HACKED) my own copy of Tcl to force it to compile
on 64-bit Windows, which was just enough to allow me to get VMD compiled
and do minimalistic testing, but my hacked version of Tcl is unusable
for a real VMD build as there are many internal problems in it that
still need to be fixed. I've heard that people have recently
hacked up a 64-bit Python, but I don't think that Python is quite ready
for prime-time on 64-bit Windows yet either.

I've filed bugs about building Tcl/Tk on 64-bit Windows /w MSVS 2005 already
many months ago, but to my knowledge the problems have not been fixed yet.
If I have to, I'll continue working on porting Tcl/Tk myself, but as you
can probably imagine, I have many other things I need to work on with VMD
and would rather that the Tcl/Tk developers do this for themselves.

I will take a look at this again in a few weeks when I'm done with some
urgent work here, but I can't promise a firm date on a 64-bit build
of VMD for Windows until after Tcl/Tk are fixed. Once Tcl/Tk are buildable
on Windows XP x64 using MSVS 2005, it should only take a week or two to get
an installer and test version released for interested users.

  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Wed, Sep 06, 2006 at 03:51:10PM -0400, Dan Strahs wrote:
>
>
> Hi John et al:
>
> Is is possible to get a 64-bit binary version of VMD for WindowsXP?
>
> A colleague of mine has recently purchased a Dell Precision 690 with two
> 64-bit dual-core processors with hyperthreading. Do you have a machine
> available for this?
>
> Dan Strahs
> 

-- 
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