From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Sat Dec 01 2012 - 23:20:06 CST

Hi,
  We've never had the firewire drivers working well enough
under Linux to run the Phantom devices natively on a Linux
machine. Up to now, we have always run the Phantom devices
off of a Windows machine. We would then setup a VRPN server on
the Windows machine, and connect to it over the network from
our Linux/Windows/MacOS machines as needed. This wastes a windows
laptop on running the phantom, but it was very expedient and trouble
free for the most part. I don't have any particular advice about
getting the Phantom drivers working on Linux, from your description
it sounds like the Sensable people aren't working very hard on the
Linux support, so you might be better off just using a Windows machine,
unless the Sensable people know for sure that there's some particular
version of Linux that their current drivers have been tested on recently.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 06:22:23PM +0000, Ray, William wrote:
> Hello,
>
> We are working on setting up a Phantom Omni to use with VMD on a CentOS 6 machine. We have confirmed that the Phantom Omni itself works on Windows 7. We are still early in the set up process for CentOS, and were wondering if anyone has any tips on setting it up?
>
> So far we have the PDD installed, and when we run PHANToMConfiguration, the device's serial number is found. When we run PHANToMTest, however, the application comes up, but we are not able to do anything. Since the support at Sensable is fairly minimal for CentOS, we have decided to move on to installing cmake and trying to set up VRPN. Does anyone have any tips on anything to watch out for with the VRPN set up, or on whether we should pursue getting PHANToMTest to actually work?
>
> Thanks for any thoughts anyone might have on this!
> Will Ray

-- 
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