VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Fri Feb 18 2011 - 11:57:33 CST

David,
  I would think that should be workable, although I'm only using
MSVS 2005 here, due to the need to link against various libraries.
For your puroses MSVS 2010 might work ok. Before we get into it,
I assume for starters that you're able to compile and link CAVElib
demo apps using MSVS 2010, right? Since your end-goal is to get
VMD running with the Windows CAVElib, I'd test to make sure that doesn't
have any issues with MSVS 2010 first. If not, then the next thing is
to get your Tcl/Tk/FLTK builds for Windows going, as you need Tcl
to be compiled already before you can begin building the VMD plugins.
See if you can get those steps done first.

Cheers,
  John

On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 08:57:13PM -0500, David Joiner wrote:
> Sounds fun.
>
> Right now I have both MS Visual C++ Express and Cygwin with gcc and
> make installed. Versions are listed below.
>
> Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
> Version 10.0.30319.1 RTMRel
> Microsoft .NET Framework
> Version 4.0.30319 RTMRel
>
> Installed Version: VC Express
>
> bash-3.2$ gcc --version
> gcc (GCC) 4.3.4 20090804 (release) 1
> Copyright (C) 2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
> This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO
> warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
>
> bash-3.2$ make --version
> GNU Make 3.81
> Copyright (C) 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
> This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.
> There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
> PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
>
> This program built for i686-pc-cygwin
> bash-3.2$
>
>
> Thanks!
> Dave.
>
> On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 3:40 PM, John Stone <johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu> wrote:
> >
> > David,
> >  Compiling VMD for windows is quite involved, but if you're
> > doing a CAVE build, there's really no alternative approach.
> > The reason it is complex is because you first have to have all
> > of the library depencies compiled and in-place, then the VMD plugins,
> > and then VMD itself.  The other thing to watch out for is that all
> > of the libraries and VMD itself have to be compiled using the same
> > runtime settings in the Microsoft tools, so that you don't have
> > various kinds of DLL conflicts for MSVCRT.DLL, etc.
> >
> > If you're an experienced Windows developer, then none of this is
> > news to you, but most people that ask about Windows compilation
> > don't realize what they are actually getting into... :-)
> >
> > One problem you will have to resolve (I will be happy to try and help
> > as much as possible):
> >  We have never compiled VMD with CAVElib support on Windows...
> > Although VMD uses the standard CAVElib routines in most places,
> > it makes extensive use of CAVElib-provided shared memory for storage
> > of its internal scene graph (all of the geometry that gets drawn by
> > the renderer worker processes/threads).
> > I don't know if that functionality is replicated in the Windows versions
> > of CAVElib or not.  Even if it is, another complication is whether the
> > Windows implementation of CAVElib is done using threads or with separate
> > processes.  VMD was written when CAVElib was always implemented with
> > separate processes, and since the UIUC CAVEs have always run a process-based
> > CAVElib, I don't know if there will be any hidden "gotchas" with
> > unintentionally shared data between worker threads in a Windows CAVElib.
> >
> > To start out with, I think you'll have to compile VMD from source on Windows,
> > and once you get that far, we can work on whatever CAVElib issues that arise
> > after that.
> >
> > To build VMD on windows, you need to use the Cygwin utilities for GNU make,
> > but the actual source code compilation is done using the Microsoft compilers.
> >
> > If you tell me what compiler versions you have installed, we can proceed
> > from there.
> >
> > Cheers,
> >  John Stone
> >  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
> >
> > On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 03:12:44PM -0500, David Joiner wrote:
> >> I know this question has been asked before, but as the answer is
> >> usually "Do you really want to do that?" (and the response is usually
> >> "I guess not") I'll ask again.
> >>
> >> How do you compile VMD from source for Windows?
> >>
> >> I ask because I want to compile VMD with CAVElib options to run on a
> >> Windows XP Cave.
> >>
> >> Dave Joiner
> >
> > --
> > 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
> > 

-- 
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