VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Thu Oct 26 2006 - 11:22:24 CDT

Hi,
  The symptom you describe is caused by your X-windows server crashing,
caused by a buggy display driver... The Matrox drivers for Linux are
known to be pretty buggy as I recall. If you haven't checked already, the
obvious first step is to find out if there's a more up-to-date Matrox
driver available for your G450.

On the VMD side, the one thing you can try is to run VMD in a
constrained graphics mode which disables it's use of advanced
OpenGL features. You can do this by setting the VMDSIMPLEGRAPHICS
environment variable prior to running VMD, e.g.:
  setenv VMDSIMPLEGRAPHICS 1
  
This may or may not allow you to use the Matrox card. If the Matrox drivers
don't correctly handle plain OpenGL 1.1 features, then even this may
not solve your problem, and you should then pursue upgrading to a graphics
accelerator that has better Linux drivers.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Thu, Oct 26, 2006 at 05:09:03PM +0100, nunolf_at_ci.uc.pt wrote:
> Hi *
>
> I have a machine with a Matrox Millenium MGA G450 DualHead graphic board,
> running in a PIII dual.
> I installed vmd linux opengl 1.8.5 and the -dispdev text flavour seems to work:
>
> Info) VMD for LINUX, version 1.8.5 (August 25, 2006)
> Info) http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/
> Info) Email questions and bug reports to vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
> Info) Please include this reference in published work using VMD:
> Info) Humphrey, W., Dalke, A. and Schulten, K., `VMD - Visual
> Info) Molecular Dynamics', J. Molec. Graphics 1996, 14.1, 33-38.
> Info) -------------------------------------------------------------
> Info) Multithreading available, 2 CPUs detected.
>
> But if I try to run vmd in graphical mode, then monitor freezes for a second and
> linux gets out of my user. Does anyone have a machine with similar
> characteristics running successfully vmd?
>
> Best,
> Nuno 

-- 
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