VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Mon Sep 20 2010 - 00:23:29 CDT

Hi,
  We had to make these changes as a result of some Linux distributions
that (for security reasons) prevent the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment
variables from being inherited by sub-shells spawned through xterm and
similar terminal programs. This is a problem for VMD as we currently
link against a number of shared libraries (e.g. CUDA) that have to
be included as part of the VMD installation so that VMD can still run
even if the end-user doesn't otherwise have these libraries installed
on their machine. For those that want VMD to start in a separate
shell, you can simply alias 'vmd' to 'xterm -e /usr/local/bin/vmd &'
or something like that.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Sun, Sep 19, 2010 at 10:10:26PM -0700, Gianluca Interlandi wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I have started using VMD 1.8.7 openGL 32bit and I noticed that it no
> longer opens an external terminal window, instead it uses the same
> terminal from which it was started. I would prefer the old behavior. By
> looking at the script in bin/vmd I see that the text at the very end is
> commented out:
>
> # # if DISPLAY is set, spawn off a terminal, else use current terminal
> # if ($?DISPLAY) then
> # if ("$VMDWEBHELPER" == "1") then
> ## exec $VMD_WINTERM -T "vmd console" $VMD_WINGEOM $VMD_WINOPTS \
> ## "$MASTERVMDDIR/$execname" $*
> # exec $VMD_WINTERM -T "vmd console" $VMD_WINGEOM $VMD_WINOPTS \
> # "env LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH $MASTERVMDDIR/$execname" $*
> # else
> ## exec $VMD_WINTERM -T "vmd console" $VMD_WINGEOM $VMD_WINOPTS \
> ## "$MASTERVMDDIR/$execname" $* &
> # exec $VMD_WINTERM -T "vmd console" $VMD_WINGEOM $VMD_WINOPTS \
> # "env LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH $MASTERVMDDIR/$execname" $*
> &
> # endif
> # else
> $vmdprefixcmd "$MASTERVMDDIR/$execname" $*
> # endif
>
> If I uncomment it, except the ##, I get the old window behavior back. Why
> did the developers decide to hide this part of the script?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Gianluca
>
> -----------------------------------------------------
> Gianluca Interlandi, PhD gianluca_at_u.washington.edu
> +1 (206) 685 4435
> http://artemide.bioeng.washington.edu/
>
> Postdoc at the Department of Bioengineering
> at the University of Washington, Seattle WA U.S.A.
> ----------------------------------------------------- 

-- 
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