VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Fri Apr 01 2005 - 16:23:11 CST

Hi,
  It sounds to me like you've got a flaky video driver. If you're
using an NVidia or ATI card, you'd probably be best off downloading
the device drivers from their respective web sites rather than running
the ones that Xorg ships by default, since in my experience the Xorg
drivers are less reliable. GLX gears is a very simple OpenGL program,
and it doesn't exercise any of the advanced OpenGL features required
for programs like VMD to run. You may also want to try running VMD in a
substantially less graphically agressive mode as a very short-term solution,
though you'll be getting lower performance and lower quality graphics as
a result, this may avoid crashing the driver since it won't use the more
advanced OpenGL functions:
  setenv VMDSIMPLEGRAPHICS 1

If that doesn't help, then you'll have no choice but to change
your Xserver/driver/kernel versions to get a more stable combination.

  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Sat, Apr 02, 2005 at 12:04:12AM +0200, Jernej Zidar wrote:
> Hi to everyone.
> I'm have a strange problem with VMD. I made a major software upgrade
> and from then on VMD causes xorg to crash. Under upgrade I mean new
> kernel version, new version of KDE and xorg (instead of Xfree).
> If I try to run VMD then for a brief moment I'm able to see the text
> window, but then the image on the monitor turns to garbage and xorg
> restarts.
> My sistem is PentiumM Centrino with Nvidia GeforceFX 5200 graphics
> chip. I'm currently using Xorg 6.8.0. GLX gears are running and showing
> 500 fps.
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> cheers,
> JZidar 

-- 
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