VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Fri Dec 11 2009 - 14:34:23 CST

Rob,
  Run the program "locale", you should see something like this
(but with your language settings) when you run it:

johns{179} locale
LANG=en_US
LC_CTYPE="en_US"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US"
LC_TIME="en_US"
LC_COLLATE="en_US"
LC_MONETARY="en_US"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US"
LC_PAPER="en_US"
LC_NAME="en_US"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US"
LC_ALL=

I can't immediately, explain why you have trouble with the 64-bit version
but not the 32-bit version, except that if the bug is in Tcl/Tk 8.5.x
that it may be some minor error in X11 or Tk's handling of internationalized
input methods, where they incorrectly assume the size of some integer types
in the 64-bit case but not the 32-bit case.

You had asked what changed between VMD 1.8.6 and 1.8.7, one of the things
that changed is that VMD 1.8.7 is using Tcl/Tk 8.5.x, whereas VMD 1.8.6
was using Tcl/Tk 8.4.x, so it may be some bug in the new version of Tcl/Tk
or at least bad interaction that exists between Tcl/Tk and your X11
implementation. To determine whether it's X11 or Tk, one would need to
reproduce the locale and/or X11 input mechanism you're using on a different
Linux distro and see if the same problem crops up, if so then I'd say that
this is almost certainly a bug in Tcl/Tk 8.5.x. I'll take a look at the
Tcl/Tk 8.5.x bug tracking system and see if they've had any reports of
internationalization or X11 input problems like the one you're having.

Just out of curiosity: Does your machine have a stock Tcl/Tk installation
that came with your distro installed on it, and if so, what happens if
you run "wishx", and is your "wishx" 32-bit or 64-bit? (you can find
out what ABI a program was compiled with by using the "file" command,
e.g. file /usr/bin/wishx)

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

Cheers,
  John

On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 06:53:35AM -0800, Rob wrote:
> John Stone wrote on Thu Dec 10 2009:
> >
> > What locale is
> your system using?
> > Do you have SCIM enabled or disabled?
> > Do you have any special internationalized keyboard
> > handling turned on?
>
> I have no access to that machine until after the weekend.
>
> But now do I find out the locale? By doing "env | grep LANG"?
>
> As I am in Korea, I have "Korean-support" installed on my
> Fedora 12 systems; I use IBus as my input method for Korean.
>
> All this is the same on my Fedora 12 32bits system and there
> vmd 1.8.7 works just fine (with the same nVidia GeForce 8600
> GTS video card and the nouveau driver).
>
> Is there something essential different between the 32bits and
> 64bits version with respect to the locale?
>
> Rob.
>
>
> 

-- 
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