VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Thu Feb 17 2011 - 14:40:24 CST

David,
  Compiling VMD for windows is quite involved, but if you're
doing a CAVE build, there's really no alternative approach.
The reason it is complex is because you first have to have all
of the library depencies compiled and in-place, then the VMD plugins,
and then VMD itself. The other thing to watch out for is that all
of the libraries and VMD itself have to be compiled using the same
runtime settings in the Microsoft tools, so that you don't have
various kinds of DLL conflicts for MSVCRT.DLL, etc.

If you're an experienced Windows developer, then none of this is
news to you, but most people that ask about Windows compilation
don't realize what they are actually getting into... :-)

One problem you will have to resolve (I will be happy to try and help
as much as possible):
  We have never compiled VMD with CAVElib support on Windows...
Although VMD uses the standard CAVElib routines in most places,
it makes extensive use of CAVElib-provided shared memory for storage
of its internal scene graph (all of the geometry that gets drawn by
the renderer worker processes/threads).
I don't know if that functionality is replicated in the Windows versions
of CAVElib or not. Even if it is, another complication is whether the
Windows implementation of CAVElib is done using threads or with separate
processes. VMD was written when CAVElib was always implemented with
separate processes, and since the UIUC CAVEs have always run a process-based
CAVElib, I don't know if there will be any hidden "gotchas" with
unintentionally shared data between worker threads in a Windows CAVElib.

To start out with, I think you'll have to compile VMD from source on Windows,
and once you get that far, we can work on whatever CAVElib issues that arise
after that.

To build VMD on windows, you need to use the Cygwin utilities for GNU make,
but the actual source code compilation is done using the Microsoft compilers.

If you tell me what compiler versions you have installed, we can proceed
from there.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 03:12:44PM -0500, David Joiner wrote:
> I know this question has been asked before, but as the answer is
> usually "Do you really want to do that?" (and the response is usually
> "I guess not") I'll ask again.
>
> How do you compile VMD from source for Windows?
>
> I ask because I want to compile VMD with CAVElib options to run on a
> Windows XP Cave.
>
> Dave Joiner 

-- 
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