VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Tue Sep 19 2006 - 22:49:20 CDT

Seth,
  You won't be able to load standard VMD builds as a module into
an arbitrary Python interpreter; rather, VMD has a built-in
Python interpreter, in which you can run your own scripts.

Justin Gullingsrud created a modified version of VMD that
could be run as a Python module, but I don't recall how
far he got with it. I vaguely recall that we determined that
going further than he did in his tests would require turning
VMD inside out, so that the scripting language was on top and
VMD was driven by the scripting interface, which is the opposite
of how the program works now. Currently, VMD is in control
and it pumps events through each text of the text interpreters
as it runs. The 'startvmd.py' script is related to that experiment.

  John

On Wed, Sep 20, 2006 at 01:19:02PM +1000, Dr. Seth Olsen wrote:
> HI VMDers,
>
> I've recently tried to import startvmd.py and VMD.py in a
> python2.4interpreter, and I've gotten errors that I can't seem to
> ascribe to a
> mismatch in the python versions.
> For example:
> >>>import startvmd
> Traceback (most recent call last):
> File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
> File "/usr/local/lib/vmd/scripts/python/startvmd.py", line 18, in ?
> import vmd, select, threading, sys, os
> ImportError: No module named vmd
>
> I seemed to work around this by changing 'vmd' to 'VMD' in the
> startvmd.pyfile. However, upon importing startvmd after this (or
> importing
> VMD.py) I got the error:
> >>>import startvmd
> Traceback (most recent call last):
> File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
> File "/usr/local/lib/vmd/scripts/python/startvmd.py", line 18, in ?
> import VMD, select, threading, sys, os
> File "/usr/local/lib/vmd/scripts/python/VMD.py", line 27, in ?
> import animate
> ImportError: No module named animate
>
> Which is interesting, because the VMD documentation mentions this module,
> but I can't find it anywhere in my distribution. I am running VMD1.8.5 on a
> P4 machine with FC5. VMD was installed from the precompiled binary.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Seth
>
>
> --
> ccmsccmsccmsccmsccmsccmsccmsccmsccmsccmsccmsccmsccmsccmsccmsccms
>
> Dr Seth Olsen, PhD
> Postdoctoral Fellow, Biomolecular Modeling Group
> Centre for Computational Molecular Science
> Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (Bldg. 75)
> The University of Queensland
> Qld 4072, Brisbane, Australia
>
> tel (617) 3346 3976
> fax (617) 33654623
> email: s.olsen1_at_uq.edu.au
> Web: www.ccms.uq.edu.au
>
> ccmsccmsccmsccmsccmsccmsccmsccmsccmsccmsccmsccmsccmsccmsccmsccms
> The opinions expressed here are my own and do not reflect the positions of
> the University of Queensland. 

-- 
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