VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Thu Mar 21 2013 - 10:57:58 CDT

Tom,
  I'm out of town at a conference and haven't been able to check
email for a few days.

All you really need to do to get VMD working with a Phantom is
get the Phantom working itself, and then compile a VRPN server
for it. If you can get VRPN working, then from there it is easy
to get VMD talking to VRPN. It is just the first two steps that
are historically tricky, and in my experience it's whether your
linux kernel has working firewire drivers etc. I see you wrote
another subsequent email so I'll check that one next...

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 11:28:14AM -0500, Thomas C. Bishop wrote:
> Dear VMD and Will Ray,
>
> are there any updates/developments w/r/to VMD and a Phantom Omni?
>
> Instead of having an actual dedicated windows machine does anyone have
> experience with a Windows machine w/in VirtualBox inside the same server?
>
> I'm using Opensuse 12.4
>
> TOm
>
>
> From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
> Date: Sat Dec 01 2012 - 23:20:06 CST
>
> Next message: John Stone: "Re: cant open .car file"
> Previous message: John Stone: "Re: unable to load cartoon
> represention of my peptide"
> In reply to: Ray, William: "Setting up a Phantom Omni for use with
> VMD on CentOS 6"
> Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [
> attachment ]
>
> Hi,
> We've never had the firewire drivers working well enough
> under Linux to run the Phantom devices natively on a Linux
> machine. Up to now, we have always run the Phantom devices
> off of a Windows machine. We would then setup a VRPN server on
> the Windows machine, and connect to it over the network from
> our Linux/Windows/MacOS machines as needed. This wastes a windows
> laptop on running the phantom, but it was very expedient and trouble
> free for the most part. I don't have any particular advice about
> getting the Phantom drivers working on Linux, from your description
> it sounds like the Sensable people aren't working very hard on the
> Linux support, so you might be better off just using a Windows machine,
> unless the Sensable people know for sure that there's some particular
> version of Linux that their current drivers have been tested on recently.
>
> Cheers,
> John Stone
> vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
>
> On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 06:22:23PM +0000, Ray, William wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > We are working on setting up a Phantom Omni to use with VMD on a
> CentOS 6 machine. We have confirmed that the Phantom Omni itself works
> on Windows 7. We are still early in the set up process for CentOS, and
> were wondering if anyone has any tips on setting it up?
> >
> > So far we have the PDD installed, and when we run
> PHANToMConfiguration, the device's serial number is found. When we run
> PHANToMTest, however, the application comes up, but we are not able to
> do anything. Since the support at Sensable is fairly minimal for CentOS,
> we have decided to move on to installing cmake and trying to set up
> VRPN. Does anyone have any tips on anything to watch out for with the
> VRPN set up, or on whether we should pursue getting PHANToMTest to
> actually work?
> >
> > Thanks for any thoughts anyone might have on this!
> > Will Ray
> --
> *******************************
> Thomas C. Bishop
> Tel: 318-257-5209
> Fax: 318-257-3823
> www.latech.edu/~bishop
> ******************************** 

-- 
NIH Center for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/           Phone: 217-244-3349
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/