VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Fri Sep 12 2008 - 16:03:48 CDT

Hi,
  I'm guessing this is being caused by an interaction between Tcl/Tk 8.4
and the "SCIM" internationalization features in the new Linux distrubutions.
This has come up previously with some of the Suse Linux distributions.
I'll have test versions based on Tcl 8.5.x available in the near future
which should alleviate this issue once and for all. This issue is mentioned
(for Suse) in the VMD 1.8.6 Linux release notes:
  http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/current/linuxrelnotes.html

>From the VMD 1.8.6 release notes:
  Suse 10.x users may experience problems using the Tk input fields of VMD as a result of known problems with Tcl/Tk and SCIM (which Suses uses by default):
  http://lists.suse.com/archive/m17n/2006-Mar/0007.html http://lists.suse.com/archive/m17n/2006-Mar/0008.html http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Message/Tcl-core/3114542

The only solutions currently available for this problem are either to disable SCIM, or to recompile VMD against the new Tcl 8.4.13 versions that include SCIM input fixes. SCIM can be disabled (for VMD) with: XMODIFIERS=@im=local

I'd try the SCIM disable workaround and see if that works for you or not.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 10:17:56AM -1000, Irene Newhouse wrote:
>
> We recently got a linux box for MD data processing, but are having problems with VMD 1.8.6. The information that's input into boxes is only intermittently accepted, or not at all. For instance, when loading a new molecule, the browser bar freezes up before you can find your working dir. You can still type it in, so that's merely annoying. However, when you try to use the Extensions, frequently it won't accept any user input & that means you can't do what you want- RMSD & autopsfgen are two things we've tried recently that worked as expected when we switched machines to a Windows box, but did not detect the user input on the linux box.
>
> The system is an x86_64 from Dell, dual core, running Red Hat Enterprise linux v 5.
>
> Back in June, we tried the alpha releases of VMD & those didn't work any better. We've noticed there's new ones from last month. Should we be trying those, or is there something else going on?
>
> Thanks!
> Irene Newhouse
> _________________________________________________________________
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-- 
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