From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Mon Oct 08 2007 - 11:48:43 CDT

Hi,
  If it occurs with most any PDB, then this sounds like a symptom of
an out-of-date Linux kernel that has multithreading bugs. See the
first paragraph on this page:
  http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/current/linuxrelnotes.html

If your kernel is older than 2.6.9-42 you may have this kernel bug.

If this is the case, your choices are either: a) upgrade your kernel
or b) compile a non-multithreaded version VMD

Its possible you have some other problem, but this is my guess based
on the small amount of information you provided in your email below.
In order to help others help you better, next time you should at least
state what platform you're using, what version of VMD you're using,
and provide a copy of the the VMD startup messages to help us learn
more about your system.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Mon, Oct 08, 2007 at 10:45:50AM -0400, weilin Zhang wrote:
> Hi
>
> I have been in a strange situation that I could not find any solution
> from previous mail list.
> My vmd crashes when I attempted to load a .pdb file when I simply run vmd.
> Either
> vmd xxx.pdb
> or load new molecule->xxx.pdb
> will terminate the current vmd program.
>
> However when I have psf and the crd file, it works.
> Very strangely, according to some previous information I run a debug mode:
> vmd -debug.
>
> (gdb)run
> then I load pdb file it works. Does it mean that there is no problem
> with all those libraries thing?
>
> Thank you for your advice
>
> Weilin

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