VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Thu Nov 13 2008 - 08:26:20 CST

Jufang,
  If your machine can be upgraded by installing a discrete graphics card
to superced that onboard VIA chip, I would highly recommend doing so.
For very little money you could upgrade your system with a recent GPU
from NVIDIA or AMD and it would solve both the problem you're having
presently, as well as significantly improve the VMD graphics performance
on your system. At present your driver is falling back to a fairly
low performance rendering path, and as you've seen it is also buggy.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 10:48:17AM +0800, Jufang Shan wrote:
> Hi John,
>
> I have VIA CHROME9 HC IGP graphics card but not sure whether I have the
> latest driver.
>
> I tried
> VMDSIMPLEGRAPHICS=1
> export VMDSIMPLEGRAPHICS
> and it seems working now.
>
> But I do find some errors in the VMD startup message:
> libGL error: UNIX signal already caught!Warning) Simple graphics mode:
> OpenGL 1.
> 0, no extensions
> Info) OpenGL renderer: Mesa GLX Indirect
> Info) Features:
> Info) GLSL rendering mode is NOT available.
>
> Many thanks,
> Jufang
>
> On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 11:35 PM, John Stone <johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu> wrote:
>
> >
> > Hi,
> > Sorry for the slow reply, your email slipped past me as I was in
> > the process of flying back from South Africa on the day you sent it.
> > The problem you're describing sounds to me like a video driver bug.
> > What video card or chipset are you using? Have you installed the latest
> > Linux drivers for your card? If you've already installed the latest
> > driver, try doing this (csh syntax):
> > setenv VMDSIMPLEGRAPHICS 1
> >
> > or (sh, bash syntax)
> > VMDSIMPLEGRAPHICS=1
> > export VMDSIMPLEGRAPHICS
> >
> > If enabling those cures the problem, then it's almost certainly
> > the result of a video driver bug of some sort. Send me the
> > VMD startup message, in particular the OpenGL-related lines,
> > and I may have further suggestions.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > John Stone
> > vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
> >
> > On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 11:13:32PM +0800, Jufang Shan wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > I installed VMD on novel SUSE 10 using package
> > > vmd-1.8.6.bin.LINUX.opengl.tar.gz by following the installation
> > > instructions.
> > >
> > > And this is the configure options:
> > > LINUX OPENGL FLTK TK ACTC IMD SPACEBALL LIBTACHYON VRPN NETCDF TCL PYTHON
> > > PTHREADS NUMPY SILENT
> > >
> > > I can start and run VMD but can not display NewRibbons and New Cartoon. I
> > > can display Licorice, Trace etc.
> > >
> > > Do you have any clue what is going wrong with my installation?
> > >
> > > Many thanks,
> > > Jufang
> >
> > --
> > 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/ <http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/%7Ejohns/>
> > Fax: 217-244-6078
> > 

-- 
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