VMD-L Mailing List

From: Robert Milius (milius_at_bscl.msi.umn.edu)
Date: Fri Jan 12 2001 - 16:41:52 CST

Hello,

I'm having trouble getting the hardware accellerated version of vmd
to run on linux.

I downloaded the DRI version vmd-1.6 for linux
(vmd-1.6.bin.LINUX.opengl.tar.gz).

I am running redhat 6.2 with XFree86 4.0.2 with the nvidia 0.9-5
drivers (GeForce2 GTS card). My kernel is 2.2.16.

I installed Mesa-3.4 to get the libGLU and libglut libraries residing
in /usr/local/lib. I removed the libGL.so* in /usr/local/lib (created
by the Mesa-3.4 install) and replaced them with softlinks to the
nvidia libraries (/usr/lib/libGL.so) and verified that I could get
hardware accelerated 3d graphics (eg quake3, gears, O, etc worked
wonderfully).

After installing vmd, it would fire up a small terminal window and then
exit immediately. There may have been an error message but it was gone
to quick to read.

It seems to be using the appropiate shared libraries (ie they all
are pointing to real files or appropiate symlinks)

$ ldd /usr/local/lib/vmd/vmd_LINUX
        libGL.so.1 => /usr/local/lib/libGL.so.1 (0x40015000)
        libGLU.so.1 => /usr/local/lib/libGLU.so.1 (0x4027e000)
        libX11.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.6 (0x40291000)
        libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x4036c000)
        libutil.so.1 => /lib/libutil.so.1 (0x40371000)
        libm.so.6 => /lib/libm.so.6 (0x40374000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x40391000)
        libvga.so.1 => /usr/lib/libvga.so.1 (0x40486000)
        libSM.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libSM.so.6 (0x404cb000)
        libICE.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libICE.so.6 (0x404d4000)
        libXmu.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXmu.so.6 (0x404eb000)
        libXext.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXext.so.6 (0x404ff000)
        libXi.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXi.so.6 (0x4050c000)
        libpthread.so.0 => /lib/libpthread.so.0 (0x40514000)
        /lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000)
        libXt.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXt.so.6 (0x40527000)

On a lark, I changed /usr/local/lib/libGL.so.1 from pointing to
the nvidia library to the one that Mesa-3.4 created and then vmd ran
ok. However, as expected, there wasn't any hardware acceleration of the
3D graphics.

I tried downloading the source and compiling it myself, but I ran
into several problems which I could describe in greater detail later.
Right now I'd like to know if there's anything I can do to get the
pre-compiled version to run with hardware accelerated 3D graphics.

-thanks
bob

Robert P. Milius, Ph.D. 612-626-2771 (office)
Basic Sciences Computing Laboratory 612-625-4433 (fax)
University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute milius_at_msi.umn.edu
for Digital Simulation and Advanced Computation