VMD-L Mailing List

From: Daniel Beaman (dbeaman_at_uoregon.edu)
Date: Tue Nov 20 2007 - 16:04:57 CST

Hello,
I'm fairly new to this so I apologize if things aren't clear the
first time I try to describe what I'm doing. If you need
clarification don't hesitate to ask.
I've installed VMD on a remote Linux machine. The installation went
fine and as far as I know there are no problems on that end of things.
The problem I am having is with my Mac Powerbook on my end. From a
terminal window I log into the machine and try to run VMD in the
following way:

$ xhost +computername.edu
$ ssh -X -l name etc...

I think these two lines allow me to have graphical displays piped to
my computer. What I'd like to have is the VMD GUI piped ( not sure
if this is proper terminology? ) to my Mac from the Linux Machine.
As VMD starts up on the Linux machine, it opens a window on my
powerbook and shows me technical data about the cluster, ie. #CPUs,
etc.. but then spits out the following errors:

the x server does not support the opengl glx extension
unable to create openGL window

 From multiple hours of searching the internet I have learned a
little about openGL (I'm a newbie to this type of stuff) but have
absolutely no idea how I could enable this or get openGL loaded
properly on my computer. The main reason I would like to use these
programs and computers in the way I'm describing is that the files
are prohibitively large to be transfered to my machine (I can get VMD
to run my powerbook from the Mac version of VMD that I installed, but
this still isn't much of an option) and the files live on the Linux
cluster where there are TBs worth of storage space. I also don't
have direct access to the cluster so I can't sit in front of it and
view the stuff that way. So, is there anyone out there who has done
what I am trying to do (I would imagine this is somewhat common, the
only exception being the Mac part of it) or anyone who has any ideas
on how to get this to work? I can get this to work on a Lab mates
computer who is running Linux and it seems to work fine. I've also
looked into using Virtualbox but I am unable to because I have a
powerpc rather than an intel chip. Any other ideas?

Thank you very much in advance.
Dan Beaman
University of Oregon