VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Fri May 19 2000 - 18:22:39 CDT

Dear VMD-L,
  Since I know many of you are using, or know someone
that uses VMD on Linux, I thought I'd spread some cheer..
We've recently built pre-release versions of VMD 1.5
on XFree 4.0, and gotten decent hardware accelerated
OpenGL performance. So far we have tested it on a
3dfx Voodoo3, and an NVidia TNT2 board. For the release
version of VMD 1.5, I intend to ship a pre-compiled binary
that should work for people running XFree4.0, with whatever
drivers they are using. The major difference between this
binary and the regular Mesa build is that it will be dynamically
linked against the OpenGL and X11 libraries.

In theory, this new "DRI" build of VMD will "just work" for anyone
running XFree 4.0 on Linux. The new configure script has a "DRI"
build flag similar to the original "OpenGL" and "Mesa" flags, which
is setup to work for XFree 4.0. I'm still working out the details of
adding some simple code to allow VMD to detect when its getting
hardware acceleration vs. when its using a software renderer on
XFree 4.0. This will make it easier for people to determine if
VMD is getting peak speed from their XFree 4.0 setup.

I'm planning on releasing 1.5 beta 1 in the next few days, and I'll
have one of these DRI builds available. I'm hoping that those of
you running XFree 4.0 will give it a spin and send us mail letting
us know how well it works for you.

In reading the DRI / XFree 4.0 docs, they still do not support stereoscopic
display modes on Linux, but this is something I assume will be coming
along in future revs of DRI and XFree, its just a matter of time.

So, I thought I'd send out this "heads up" message before I make the
beta 1 binaries in a couple days. If anyone wants to, the code is
already in the CVS tree, so feel free to try building for yourself
if you're curious. Otherwise binaries will come in a couple days.

You can get read-only VMD CVS access from:
  http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/cvsrequest.html
usage info is at:
  http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/anoncvs.html

  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu 

-- 
Theoretical Biophysics Group   Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu
Beckman Institute              http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/
University of Illinois         Phone:  (217) 244-3349
405 N. Mathews  Ave              FAX:  (217) 244-6078 
Urbana, IL 61801, USA          Unix Is Good For You!!!