From: Pawel Kedzierski (pawel.kedzierski_at_pwr.edu.pl)
Date: Wed Mar 25 2015 - 04:33:10 CDT

W dniu 25.03.2015 o 10:12, Ashar Malik pisze:
>
> If the install path is changed during setup ... And the installation
> done somewhere else, the rights issue does not come up.
>
Yes, provided that the user knows a priori he or she needs to workaround
a problem. Most do default install.
And even then it shouldn't hurt to start in user folder by default -
changing this is easy for those more experienced users and without the
permission issue.
The proposed change will benefit all beginners.
Pawel

> On Mar 25, 2015 10:06 PM, "Pawel Kedzierski"
> <pawel.kedzierski_at_pwr.edu.pl <mailto:pawel.kedzierski_at_pwr.edu.pl>> wrote:
>
> Dear VMD developers and users,
>
> I see on the vmd-l list and among my students that the default
> settings of VMD on Windows OS are troublesome for many users. The
> problem is that the working folder of VMD is its install folder
> (within "Program Files" or "Program Files (x86)") which is guarded
> by the OS. If one tries to save a file there, it is saved in
> hidden user folder and while it shows up in Explorer, the VMD
> plugins are not able to find it.
>
> Many times a "solution" found on the web and on vmd-l list is an
> advice to run VMD as administrator, which is a bad idea.
>
> I have tested that appending a single line to the end of vmd.rc in
> the VMD installation prevents such problems, and it seems to me a
> general way:
>
> cd %USERPROFILE%
>
> However, for non-power users of Windows, editing the global vmd.rc
> file is not trivial:
> * the file is guarded by the OS too, due to location in system folder.
> * as the file has Unix format, Notepad will concatenate all lines
> effectively destroying it;
>
> For users, the simplest solution may be to run Wordpad as
> administrator to make this change, but still this tend to be
> confusing one must know how to "show all files" at opening and
> then to save with original name and text format, but neither with
> ".txt" appended, nor even worse, converted to document format.
>
> This is why I think that a better solution would be if the vmd.rc
> on Windows would be installed with this fix included. And possibly
> also converted to Windows text format.
>
> Thanks,
> Pawel
>