From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Thu Jul 17 2008 - 17:04:38 CDT

Hi,
  I saw there was a fairly long discussion here but haven't gone
through all of the posts. Generally speaking, compiling VMD from
scratch requires building a bunch of other libraries, in particular
FLTK, Tcl/Tk, and typically a couple others. If you have modifications
for VMD that you want to make available to others, I can work with you
to do builds for your, or to incorporate your changes into the main version
of VMD depending on what you have in mind. Building all of the libraries
needed by VMD (or any large software package these days!) is a bit of a
hassle, there's no real shortcut at present, however.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 12:12:37PM -0400, Marylou Kunkle wrote:
> I am trying to compile VMD from source on Mac OS X 10.5.
>
> I am kind of new to Mac in general - just for a warning. However, I have
> read all the documentation a million times over, but I can't seem to get
> these libraries to compile or ... perhaps they're all in the wrong place.
> Either way, it yells at me that the plugins are not compiled and copied to
> 'distrib'. The plugins won't compile because of a number of things, I'm
> sure. I keep getting the error about it being unable to find -lnetcdf ... I
> don't know how to fix it. I have unsuccessfully tried to set the PLUGINDIR
> env. variable. Or I have set it, and that's not what is wrong at all .. I am
> not sure.
>
> I started by downloading and installing gcc and a whole bunch of libraries:
> fltk, opengl, tcl, and now i downloaded netcdf but i don't know what to do
> with the files it gave me. Then I tried a number of crazy things to try to
> get things to compile, but truthfully, I don't know what I'm doing.
>
> Why am I trying to compile from source on a Mac? Because we added some stuff
> to VMD and I am trying to port our version of this program to Mac and
> Windows. Just in case there's any confusion as to why I am putting myself
> through all this. :)
>
> Can anyone give me a nice step-by-step tutorial of where to start? I guess
> what is on the website really isn't detailed enough for me.
>
> Thank you,
>
> Marylou

-- 
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