VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Tue Nov 20 2007 - 17:24:36 CST

Daniel,
  I assume from your email that you already tested that you could
remote display an xterm to your Mac? You need to be sure you have
Apple X11 server installed and running on your Mac before attempting
to remote display VMD to it, as this is not necessarily installed
by default, and even when installed, I don't think it is ever
setup to run automatically on login. The first thing to check is to
make sure you can remote display an xterm from Linux to the Mac.
If you get that much working, that's a good starting point. If
you can remote display an xterm but not VMD, then it may be that
the Apple X11 server doesn't accept indirect (remote) GLX connections,
which would effectively prevent this from working. This would be a
surprise to me, as I would expect Apple would implement full GLX.
Test xterm etc and let me know when you get that working.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Tue, Nov 20, 2007 at 02:04:57PM -0800, Daniel Beaman wrote:
> 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
>
> 

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349
  WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/      Fax: 217-244-6078