VMD-L Mailing List

From: Pietro Amodeo (pamodeo_at_icmib.na.cnr.it)
Date: Sun Feb 11 2007 - 06:22:46 CST

Hi John,

thank you for you quick and (as usual) very detailed answer.
While I suspected that the mobile GPU weren't able to run GLSL, I was
rather puzzled by the VMD messages, that included som e kind of GLSL
support for it, while totally excluded GLSL among Quadro FX1400 supported
features!!!

I'll obviously like very much to end with a full-featured version of VMD
on our workstations. The only problem with older driver version could be
their compatibility with the newest version of linux kernels (>=2.6.18).
Maybe, staying on the so called "Legacy" drivers could ensure this
compatibility, although, as far as I know, this approach should limit our
choice to 1.0-7184 and 1.0-9631.

While I'm writing this email, I had the opportunity of making new tests,
providing new, exciting informations on this subject: on another
workstation, that is a clone of Workstation 2 (P4 CPU, NVidia Quadro
FX1400 GPU) but currently running FC4 (kernel 2.6.17-1.2142_FC4) with
96.29 NVidia driver, the GLSL feature is recognized and supported. So, I
downgraded NVidia drivers on Workstation 2 (FC6, kernel 2.6.19-1.2895.fc6)
from 97.46 to 96.31 (rather than 96.29 to ensure kernel compatibility)
and now GLSL is identified and supported.

The problem of internationalization of my systems should not arise,
because for several reasons (including THIS kind of potential problems) I
always install the standard US version, just specifying the Italian
keyboard and timezone.
The current output of "locale" is:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

This is the VMD log obtained by setting VMDGLSLVERBOSE to 1 on the
workstation equipped with the Quadro FX3000 board (on that with Quadro
FX1400 the log doesn't change as GLSL feature doesn't appear to be
supported at all):

Info) VMD for LINUX, version 1.8.5 (August 25, 2006)
Info) http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/
Info) Email questions and bug reports to vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
Info) Please include this reference in published work using VMD:
Info) Humphrey, W., Dalke, A. and Schulten, K., `VMD - Visual
Info) Molecular Dynamics', J. Molec. Graphics 1996, 14.1, 33-38.
Info) -------------------------------------------------------------
Info) Multithreading available, 2 CPUs detected.
Info) OpenGL renderer: Quadro FX 3000/AGP/SSE2
Info) Features: STENCIL MSAA(16) MDE CVA MTX PP PS GLSL(OVF)
Info) OpenGL shader linkage log:
Info) Fragment info
Info) -------------
Info) <stdlib>(6934) : error C5108: unknown semantics "FACE" specified for
"gl_FrontFacing"
Info) (68) : warning C7050: "objcolor" might be used before being initialized
Warning) GPU driver failed to compile shader:
Warning) /usr/local/lib/vmd/shaders/vmd
Warning) This GPU/driver is buggy, or doesn't fully implement GLSL.
Warning) Set environment variable VMDGLSLVERBOSE for more info.
Info) GLSL rendering mode is NOT available.
Info) Textures: 2-D (4096x4096), 3-D (512x512x512), Multitexture (4)

For the Spaceball issue I want to try new combinations of kernel,
libraries and compilations on VMD 1.8.5, as most of my previous work was
done on older /beta VMD versions. However, the last results on VMD 1.8.5
are:
- on Workstation 2 (FC6) using my home-made version the Spaceball works
fine (except that sometimes I must launch VMD than quit and relaunch the
program to have the ball working in addition to keys)
- on Workstation 3 (HW-clone of 2 with FC4), using dowloaded binaries the
Spaceball beeps when VMD is launched but nothing else happens (even the
keys, that in previous version worked, are now fully inactive). To have
Spaceball fully working I must launch testsball before running vmd.

I hope this information may be useful for developers and other VMD users.

Sincerely,

Pietro 

-- 
Dr. Pietro Amodeo
Istituto di Chimica Biomolecolare del CNR
Comprensorio "A. Olivetti", Edificio 70
Via Campi Flegrei 34
I-80078 Pozzuoli (Napoli) - Italy
Phone      +39-0818675072
Fax        +39-0818041770
Email    pamodeo_at_icmib.na.cnr.it