To get all this to work, certain files must be installed in the proper location, and some data files must be edited with site-specific data for your system. This section describes how to get VMD set up to work with NAMD over the network. The MDComm files and libraries mentioned in this section can be found in the lib/mdcomm directory of the VMD distribution.
First, VMD must have been compiled with the REMOTE option specified to the configure script, as described in the Installation Guide. If you are using the pre-compiled version of VMD for SGI workstations supplied in the distribution, the REMOTE option has been included, and you are OK. If not, see the Installation Guide about how to compile with the REMOTE option. At present, this has only been tested for IRIX version 5.X or HP-UX version 9.X workstations, though the complete code is available for porting to other platforms.
Second, the namd_consumer program must be installed in VMDDIR/mdcomm/bin_ARCH, where VMDDIR is the directory where VMD is installed, such as /usr/local/lib/vmd and ARCH is the type of OS (such as IRIX5 or HPUX9).
Third, VMD must be told where to find the namd_consumer executable. The environment variable MDC_CONSUMER must be set to the name of the namd_consumer program, and include the full path. The shell script provided in the VMD distribution which is used to start VMD should do this automatically; however, if things are not working, try setting it by hand before starting VMD. Also, if you install namd_consumer in some place other than as described in the previous paragraph, you need to change the vmd startup script to set MDC_CONSUMER to this different location.
Once this has been set up, you can run VMD and use it to connect to another computer which has rappd running and which can run NAMD. But before this will work, NAMD and rappd must be set up properly, using the instructions in the following section.