From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Thu Jan 27 2011 - 13:44:16 CST

Joshua,
  I may have found what's going on with your build, but I will have to
try doing a similar build here before I can be sure. There are various
MacOS X APIs that Apple has been in the process of deprecating for a while
now, and it is possible that actual source of your problem lies with
some deprecated MacOS X APIs used in vmdGetProcAddress() that probably have
to be replaced for 64-bit builds. At the very least, I'm going to have
to revise that code somewhat. Can you send me your version of the 'configure'
script so I can compare what you did vs. the current code I have in the tree?
If not, no biggie, I can do it all from scratch if necessary once I get the
FLTK 1.3.x test build working on a compile/test box here.

Cheers,
  John

On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 07:35:56AM -0500, Joshua A. Anderson wrote:
> On Jan 26, 2011, at 3:31 PM, John Stone wrote:
>
> > This is almost certainly a MacOS X OpenGL driver bug of some kind.
>
>
> OK, I just double checked on my laptop - it has the same issue and with a very different GPU.
>
> It must be a doozy of a bug: I didn't check all of the missing extensions, but just on that shader object extension, every single pointer comes back NULL: I dropped this at line 416 and got 0x0 for all 17 pointers.
> printf("%p\n", p_glCreateShaderObjectARB);
> printf("%p\n", p_glCreateProgramObjectARB);
> ....
> printf("%p\n", p_glUniform4fvARB);
>
> I'll see if I can find time next week to setup a minimal repro case to narrow down the issue or for a bug report.
>
> > By the way, I'm curious how stable FLTK 1.3.x and Tcl/Tk 8.6.x are
> > on your 64-bit Mac? I'm tempted to put together a 64-bit VMD for MacOS X
> > now that they have release candidates for FLTK 1.3.x, but Tcl/Tk 8.6.x is
> > still considered a beta. Any comments?
>
> Carolyn and I have been running a build with an old trunk/ build of FLTK 1.3.x for quite a while now and haven't noticed any stability issues. We are still on tcl 8.5.8/.9 as this is the version that macports installs, so I cannot comment on 8.6.x. The build on my iMac is new and made with FLTK 1.3.x RC1 - will let you know if I run into stability issues there.
>
> There is only one apparent problem in that many of the plugins fail to load - leaving the following messages at launch.
>
> The irspecgui package could not be loaded:
> The multiseq package could not be loaded:
> The pmepot_gui package could not be loaded:
> The solvate package could not be loaded:
> The autopsf package could not be loaded:
> The cggui package could not be loaded:
> The dowser_gui package could not be loaded:
> The membrane package could not be loaded:
> The mutator package could not be loaded:
> The autoimd package could not be loaded:
>
> We don't use any of those, so it hasn't bothered us :)
>
> Besides hacking the vmd configure scripts quite a bit to get it to link against the macports built libraries, I did have to hack the VMD source in a few places to get it to run. I've attached these as patch files so you can see exactly what I had to do - I don't know enough about VMD multi-arch builds to know how to implement these changes in a way that won't effect the other builds.
>
> The first hack is a change to use FL::wait(0) instead of flush(), which I believe we discussed on the mailing list a while back - that change had to be made to get my builds to run even before going to x86_64. Without it, I just got the spinning wheel after launching vmd and the windows would not respond to any mouse events.
>
> The second hack is a change I had to make to macosxvmdstart.C to get things to run. Its been a while since I made the change - so I don't exactly remember why I had to. All I know is that it is on the snow-leopard branch in my vmd git repository, so it must not have been needed for the 32-bit builds. I think the change was needed to avoid a compile error. I'm not even sure what the code I changed does!
>

-- 
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