VMD-L Mailing List

From: Justin Gullingsrud (justin_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Sat Oct 07 2000 - 11:03:30 CDT

Hi,

I ran into this problem with the new gcc/g++ on RH7, but I had so many
other problems with the rest of the distribution that I didn't pursue
it ;->

I would guess that the reason VMD dies right away is not due to any
Xfree/DRI problems, but incompatibilities with libstd++. Could be wrong...
In any case, the way we do lex.yy.cc is kinda hokey, but since not just
Inform but three or four other C++ classes are 'exposed' to AtomLexer,
it would be a bit of work to make AtomLexer pure C.

Here's an idea, I have no idea if this would work or not, but what if
you put

#ifndef __cplusplus
#define __cplusplus
#endif

at the top of AtomLexer.l? If you could try it and let us know how it
goes, that would be cool.
 
Thanks for the well-researched note.

Justin

On Sat, Oct 07, 2000 at 01:57:48AM -0400, John Duff wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I've run into a bug when trying to compile vmd using redhat 7.0 (i386).
>
> System
> ------
> 800MHz Athlon TBird (Abit KT7 mobo)
> 256M Atlas Precision RAM
> Creative Labs 3D Blaster Annihilator 2 vid card (NVIDIA GeForce 2 GTS 32M DDR)
> RedHat 7.0 (2.2.16-22 kernel)
> XFree86 4.0.1
> NVIDIA linux 0.9.5 drivers
>
>
> Synopsis
> --------
> After downloading the precompiled vmd1.6a3 Linux DRI-OpenGL package, I
> configured and installed it, but when I ran it, it immediately died after
> very briefly popping up the console window. This seems to be a known problem
> (http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/mailing_list/vmd-l/0093.html). I tried
> fixing up the links to libGL.so like the mailing list email suggested, but
> still it didn't work. So I downloaded the source and when I tried compiling
> I got the following error message:
>
> Converting AtomLexer.l --> AtomLexer.o ...
> lex.yy.c:1659: declaration of `int isatty (int)' throws different
> exceptions
> /usr/include/unistd.h:670: than previous declaration `int isatty (int)
> throw ()'
> make: *** [AtomLexer.o] Error 1
>
>
> After investigating this, I found the following (quick and dirty) workaround.
> Modify line 670 in /usr/include/unistd.h:
>
> <from>
> extern int isatty (int __fd); __THROW;
> <to>
> extern int isatty (int __fd);
>
>
> After I did this, vmd compiled smoothly and started up without any problems
> after doing a "make install". Note that after compiling vmd, you should
> undo the change to line 670 in unistd.h, as this is not a bug in unistd.h.
>
>
> More Details
> ------------
> Obviously the fix is a quick hack just to enable vmd to compile.
>
> /usr/include/unistd.h is in the glibc-devel-2.1.92-14 package. It looks
> like all the function prototypes in unistd.h now have "__THROW" appended
> to them, which is something new in this file, different from the version in
> the package found in RedHat 6.2 (glibc-devel-2.1.3-15). Furthermore, __THROW
> is defined in /usr/include/malloc.h, and it resolves to "throw" only if you're
> compiling C++ programs, which makes sense. VMD's Makefile first uses lex
> to compile the AtomLexer.l file to lex.yy.c, renames lex.yy.c to lex.yy.C,
> and then uses g++ to compile lex.yy.C. That looks like the source of the
> problem, since the use of g++ causes __THROW to be "throw" instead of "" in
> the prototype of isatty (line 670 /usr/include/unistd.h), which is different
> than the C prototype of isatty in lex.yy.c (line 1659). I tried fixing
> the Makefile to use gcc instead of g++ to compile lex.yy.c, but it looks like
> AtomLexer.l includes Inform.h, which is a C++ header file (I guess that's
> why you used g++ to compile it). So, if all this is accurate, it looks like
> you need to fix AtomLexer.l to be able to be compiled using a C compiler,
> not C++.
>
>
> -John
> jfduff_at_mtu.edu 

-- 
Justin Gullingsrud      3111 Beckman Institute
H: (217) 384-4220       I got a million ideas that I ain't even rocked yet...
W: (217) 244-8946       -- Mike D