VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Mon Aug 30 1999 - 09:36:38 CDT

> Hi,
>
> I have Linux RedHat 6.0, a 3Dfx Voodoo 3 3000 card and I'm trying to
> recompile VMD to use the latest Glide (3D accelerated) library. I have
> one problem and one question. First the problem: if I build Mesa with
> linux-glide option I get only *dynamic* .so libraries, and VMD needs
> static ones.

You can change the configure.options.LINUX.mesa flags and remove the
STATIC flag. This should allow you to link against the dynamic link
libraries. We normally build the Linux binaries statically linked in order
to avoid the myriad problems with different people's linux boxes having
different revs of libC, Mesa, etc...

> The solution would be to build the statc .a libraries or to
> let VMD use the dynamic ones. Any advice is highly appreciated in both
> tasks. Then the question: at the time the glide lib for V3 is in alpha
> stage and can only work in fullscreen.
> Is there any drawback in running VMD in fullscreen mode?

VMD has no real concept of "fullscreen". You might
be able to modify the OpenGLDisplayDevice.C code to make it work with
your fullscreen mode, but its probably more trouble than its worth. It
would be better if they fix the Voodoo drivers to work in a window.
What happens when you try using a non-fullscreen window? Does it fail
utterly, or does it switch to fullscreen, drawing to a clipped window, or to
the whole screen anyway?

> Is there a way to put GL display on local
> machine and have the dialog windows on another computer (one meter apart
> from the other). Well, to be honest I asked two questions :).

Not at the present time, but this is something that we're interested in
doing for various reasons, and it would certainly make VMD work better with
boards that are fullscreen-only. This is also a nice setup if you have a
dual screen system, or when you want to use VMD to give a presentation, but
you only want the 3-D graphics to show up on the projector etc.
I'm planning on having this capability for the next rev (after 1.4) of
VMD.

Let us know how the 3dfx drivers work out. I've got a Voodoo3 in an NT
box here that I've been testing with the Windows version of VMD, and the
3dfx drivers have a few critical bugs that prevent a normal build of
VMD from working, specifically, their driver causes applications to crash
when the application draws certain kinds of lines and points. Drawing
triangles and quads works out fine however. I've been waiting for 3dfx
to get a new driver out that has this fixed.

Let us know when you make any new discoveries on the Linux front,
many people would LOVE to be able to get hardware acceleration on their
Linux machines for running VMD.

Thanks,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu 

-- 
Theoretical Biophysics Group   Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu
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