VMD 1.8.4 MacOS X Release Notes

• The MacOS X version of VMD is implemented using a native version of the FLTK GUI toolkit, and Tcl/Tk scripting, and Apple's OpenGL implementation. VMD requires MacOS X 10.3 or later for PowerPC, and 10.4 or later on Intel.
• Mount the MacOS disk image (.dmg file) and then drag the VMD application to a folder on your system where you keep your other applications. This is normally the only installation step required.
• If you encounter difficulty running VMD by clicking the VMD application icon, this typically indicates that there's a syntax error in your .cshrc file, or in a shell script executed by the .cshrc file. You can check to see if this is the problem by temporarily renaming your .cshrc file to .cshrc.bak and then try running VMD. If VMD runs correctly with the renamed file, then the .cshrc file contains one or more errors and will need to be fixed. You can comment out individual .cshrc script commands to continue narrowing down the problem.

The binary distributions of VMD 1.8.4 for MacOS X don't have Python support enabled due to complications in making such binaries usable on MacOS 10.3. Future versions of VMD will be built against the Apple-provided Python frameworks which will alleviate some of these complications, but will require users to be running MacOS X 10.4 or newer.

In order to use features such as the 'vmdmovie' plugin, you would be well advised to install the "Fink" package manager, so that you can easily add related software such as the NetPBM image toolkit with simple commands such as "fink install netpbm".