From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Fri Nov 11 2011 - 09:26:24 CST

Frank,
  If you're having poor performance when running VMD, this is
99.9% likely to be caused by your OpenGL graphics drivers, and has
nothing at all to do with rlwrap. If you're running one of the open source
graphics drivers, you'll want to switch to using one of the vendor-provided
(e.g. AMD, Intel, or NVIDIA) OpenGL drivers. The currently available
open source graphics drivers don't perform well yet, so it's a
practical necessity to use the vendor-provided drivers for your
graphics hardware if you want good performance.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Tue, Nov 01, 2011 at 11:50:26AM -0400, Frank Barry wrote:
> I am having problems running vmd 1.9 on a newly installed Ubuntu box.
> $ vmd
> rlwrap: No match.
> I found this related posts on the list:
> http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/mailing_list/vmd-l/18099.html
>
> As in the post, if I comment out the "rlwrap block" in the start-up script
> I can get vmd to open but with quite poor performance (maybe unrelated).
> I am quite new to Linux (especially Ubuntu). So any tips on a better way
> to proceed would be helpful.
> Thanks in advance,
> Frank
> ## using vmd-1.9.bin.LINUXAMD64.opengl.tar.gz
> $ which csh rlwrap
> /bin/csh
> /usr/bin/rlwrap
> $ ./configure
> using configure.options: LINUXAMD64 OPENGL FLTK TK ACTC CUDA IMD LIBSBALL
> XINERAMA XINPUT LIBTACHYON VRPN NETCDF TCL PYTHON PTHREADS NUMPY SILENT
> $ cd src/
> $ sudo make install
> Make sure /usr/local/bin/vmd is in your path.
> VMD installation complete. Enjoy!
> $ vmd
> rlwrap: No match.
> $ head /usr/local/bin/vmd
> #!/bin/csh
> set defaultvmddir="/usr/local/lib/vmd"
> $ uname -a
> Linux perutz 3.0.0-12-generic #20-Ubuntu SMP Fri Oct 7 14:56:25 UTC 2011
> x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
> $ lsb_release -a
> No LSB modules are available.
> Distributor ID: Ubuntu
> Description: Ubuntu 11.10
> Release: 11.10
> Codename: oneiric

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