VMD-L Mailing List

From: Pawel Kedzierski (pawel.kedzierski_at_pwr.edu.pl)
Date: Tue Feb 04 2020 - 03:01:29 CST

W dniu 04.02.2020 o 03:47, Joey Gehring pisze:
> Pawel,
>
> I am pretty sure that I have successfully installed all of the tk and
> tcl files that I need. I am now perusing my need of the openGL header
> files. After a bit of research I am unsure if my board supports openGL
> or not. I am seeing that openGL ES is available and I am unsure if
> this will be enough to build NAMD or VMD. Do you happen to know more
> about this? Again, I can not thank you enough for helping me through
> this process.

I'm glad I could be of any help. As for OpenGL, I haven't heard of ARM
platform providing full OpenGL (not ES); apart form that, I lack any
expertise here, sorry.

You will need to rely on John Stone and other VMD/NAMD developers who
actually compiled both programs on ARM. I don't even know if this is
possible with OpenGL ES - they might refer to text-only version of VMD.
The last question of John was what compiler/toolchain are you using.
Since its Debian, the most likely bet is gcc, the second one being
clang. Try to see where these links go on your system:

ls -l /etc/alternatives/cc /etc/alternatives/c++

you will see if the default compiler is gcc/g++ or clang. Then command:

gcc --version

or clang --version

and provide this info to answer the John's question from Jan 23rd. To
get most help, a good idea will be to provide any other relevant info,
like the architecture your Debian system is configured for, versions of
dependencies you have installed (like tcl-dev/tk-dev), the error the
compilation ends with etc. The architecture is reported as the third
word from apt list command, e.g. on mine laptop:

apt list gcc

shows "gcc/xenial,now 4:5.3.1-1ubuntu1 amd64 [installed]" where "amd64"
is the architecture; on Pinebook it most likely is arm64 but better to
make certain. In the same way you may check the versions of anything you
installed from the Debian packages.

Getting VMD to work on OpenGL ES platform may not be easy; its not only
VMD which would need to support it, but also the FLTK library which IIRC
provides the OpenGL window (and the GUI, of course). So I would start
small and try to compile without OpenGL and FLTK to sort out a smaller
set of problems first. OTOH, such binary will only be useful for
scripting and not for interactive work :(.

HTH,

Pawel

>
> Best,
>
> Joey
>
> On Sat, Feb 1, 2020 at 11:14 AM Joey Gehring
> <gehringjoseph123_at_gmail.com <mailto:gehringjoseph123_at_gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> I appreciate the help. I will check back when I feel ready to move
> onwards. Thank you for your guidance 🙏
>
> Best,
>
> Joey
>
> On Sat, Feb 1, 2020, 6:36 AM Pawel Kedzierski
> <pawel.kedzierski_at_pwr.edu.pl <mailto:pawel.kedzierski_at_pwr.edu.pl>>
> wrote:
>
> W dniu 01.02.2020 o 05:54, Joey Gehring pisze:
> > I am still attempting compilation of vmd on the processor
> listed in
> > the subject line. I am following the instructions:
> >
> https://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/doxygen/compiling.html#compiling
> >
> > It says that I need tcl/tk files but I'm sure they need to
> be packaged
> > for ARM. Is this correct according to your knowledge?
>
> Yes, but I guess the Debian configured on your PineBook has
> probably the
> default repositories setup for ARM architecture in
> /etc/apt/sources.list
>
> If so, then it will likely be sufficient to install just the
> development
> package. Check which tcl/tk version (8.x) you need an then try:
>
> sudo apt-get install tcl8.x-dev tk8.x-dev
>
> If they are not available, you may indeed need to compile from
> source.
> Again it may be advisable to get the (regular) Debian source
> package and
> use Debian tools to compile it. A good description is in the
> Debian
> Administrator Handbook:
>
> https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-handbook/debian-packaging.en.html#sect.rebuilding-package
>
> To add another Debian repository to get the source packages not
> available for pinebook you may also need to add the signing
> key to your
> distro trust database. See `man apt-key`.
>
> HTH,
>
> Pawel
>
> >
> > Best,
> >
> > Joey
>
>