VMD-L Mailing List

From: Stefan Boresch (stefan_at_mdy.univie.ac.at)
Date: Fri Nov 20 2020 - 02:17:52 CST

Dear John, dear Jonathan,

thanks again for your efforts. I heard back from the student, and
because of the indirect communication, I may have led everyone astray.

It turns out that the student is having a AMD Radeon R5 M230 card, with
an allegedly up to date driver. So the blurb about NVIDIA/CUDA was
just a message indicating that no NVIDIA/CUDA hardware was found, which
most certainly caused no harm. Most likely OpenGL doesn't work as expected,
which, as John pointed out earlier, is a hard requirement for VMD.
The student is quite clear that things worked earlier, and that the most
recent Windows update installed itself automatically. Whether this is
relevant to the problems is difficult to say (on my fully updated Windows
laptop (with both Intel and NVIDIA graphics), VMD runs fine).

First, again my apologies for barking up the wrong tree (thanks,
Jonathan, for trying to help!). Second, since I am not a Windows
person, is there a simple test to check whether OpenGL works (like
glxgears on Linux/X?) at all?

Best regards,
Stefan

On Wed, Nov 18, 2020 at 12:35:12AM -0600, John Stone wrote:
> Stefan,
> I have forwarded on your notes to Jonathan Lefman at NVIDIA,
> and he will try and obtain assistance/suggestions for your student.
> He or others may contact you and your student to followup and get
> further important details.
>
> Regarding paused VMD and pressing "enter" in the VMD text console:
> If you interact with the text console and don't press return,
> it will (on Windows) freeze VMD waiting for input. This
> is due to the behavior of Windows line-based console handling
> vs. Unix character-based handling (which remains responsive even
> with a half-typed command). If you see such behavior, pressing
> enter should cure the issue unless you have a garbled command
> partially entered.
>
> Going forward I'm looking at integrating a different text console
> manager library that would hopefully give Windows versions of VMD
> the same overall behavior that Unix versions have always had,
> but this remains future work at present.
>
> Best,
> John Stone
> vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
>
> On Tue, Nov 17, 2020 at 10:39:20AM +0100, Stefan Boresch wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > on the odd chance that someone has an idea:
> >
> > I am presently running a course in which I use VMD a bit, and students are
> > expected to install it on their own hardware. This has worked well so
> > far, on Linux, Mac and Windows, with here in Europe Win10 being the
> > dominating OS.
> >
> > Yesterday I got a 'plea for help' from one student saying
> > that suddently VMD is not starting up anymore on her Win10 laptop, though
> > it worked before. I got some screenshots; the terminal window comes
> > up, prints
> >
> > "mismatch between CUDA runtime and GPU driver"
> >
> > and terminates. Restarting the machine, reinstalling VMD (both 1.9.3 and
> > the new 1.9.4alpha) apparently has not helped. Since this isn't my
> > hardware and since I don't have access to it because of the lockdown, this
> > is all the info I have.
> >
> > I normally run VMD on my Linux workstation, though I also have it on a Win10
> > laptop, with an NVIDIA card and all updates installed, where both vmd 1.9.3
> > and 1.9.4alpha run fine.
> >
> > The one observation I can add from my own experience is that for me (on the
> > Win10/Nvidia laptop) VMD comes up, but hangs for a while (the main menu
> > is not operational, up to minutes). Hitting Enter or Ctrl-C in the terminal
> > window usually helps.
> >
> > Any hints / suggestions to pass on welome, best regards,
> >
> > Stefan
>
> --
> 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/