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Compiling VMD from source code

Plugins and libraries required by VMD

Before you can successfully build VMD itself, several other things must be compiled and installed. At a bare minimum, a normal build of VMD requires that Tcl/Tk 8.[456].x, FLTK 1.[123].x, and OpenGL libraries be compiled and linkable from within the lib area of the VMD source tree or from the system libraries. Without these libraries and their associated header files, compilation of the VMD source code and some plugins will fail almost immediately. Additionally, if you're compiling on a Linux system, you may have out-of-date OpenGL header files. In order to compile VMD, you may have to update your system's OpenGL header files either with an updated RPM, or by getting the most recent headers from the Khronos OpenGL Registry web site

VMD also supports various optional components such as Python, VRPN, and other packages. They must be linkable in a manner similar to the Tcl/Tk and FLTK. VMD has been tested with Python 2.x and 3.x with Numeric/NumPy. VMD should be buildable with any version of VRPN from 6.00 up to 7.x.

VMD uses several external programs for various tasks, these include the STRIDE secondary structure prediction program, the SURF solvent accessible surface program, and various other optional external rendering programs.

Once all of these libraries have been built and installed where the Makefiles and configure scripts expect to find them, compilation of the VMD plugins is the next step. Since some of the plugins link against the Tcl libraries, they can't be built until Tcl is built. The Tcl version used for the plugins and VMD itself must be consistent or very strange problems can occur at dynamic loading time. The plugins are stored in a separate source tree from VMD itself, though they are packaged along with VMD source distributions. Once the plugins are compiled, and installed into a distribution target area where VMD can find them, you can proceed to compiling VMD itself. Click here to read documentation on compiling and developing plugins.

The top level VMD Makefile

The top level Makefile found in the main VMD distribution directory includes default configuration options for all of the supported target platforms for which the VMD development team provides precompiled binary versions. These defaults make it easy for someone at a remote site to use one of our standard targets to produce a binary that should be functionally identical to the binaries we produce, from source code on their own machine. Typing the 'make' command with no arguments will list the available target configurations. Typing a command such as the example below will setup the build environment to compile for one of the pre-defined targets. An example architecture is:

make solaris.opengl
The top level VMD Makefile is just a more compact and easy-to-use method of specifying options to the VMD configure script. In cases where one wants to build a custom version of VMD with various optional features disabled, it is best to work with the configure script directly. More information about working with the configure script.

Id:
pg_compiling.dox,v 1.12 2019/10/22 13:20:53 johns Exp


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