Installation

  VIEWMOL 2.2.1 was developed on a Pentium notebook running Linux using Brian Paul's OpenGL compatible library Mesa. It also compiles with OpenGLTM without any problems. VIEWMOL has been ported to Silicon Graphics computers, IBM RS/6000, DEC Alpha, Suns, and Hewlett Packard 9000/735. Since Mesa runs on any machine which has X windows it should be possible to run VIEWMOL on any machine which supports X windows. However, for best performance a native OpenGL implementation is recommended. VIEWMOL does not run on Windows PC or MacOS Macs. For use on PCs or PowerMacs Linux is required and highly recommended.

The following operating systems are presently supported:

On these operating systems the program was tested. Others may also work, but this is not certified. Previous versions of VIEWMOL have also been tested on the following systems: but since the author himself does not have access to any of these systems testing of newer versions was not possible. It can, however, be assumed that VIEWMOL will at least compile on these systems.

VIEWMOL 2.2.1 is provided precompiled for a number of architectures. Precompiled binaries are packaged separately from source, documentation, and examples:

VIEWMOL can be downloaded from: The source code and the precompiled binaries for Linux are also available from Sunsite (USA) or your friendly neighbourhood mirror.

Before installing VIEWMOL you need to make sure that the following libraries are available:

Installation of the program is simple. VIEWMOL comes as gzipped tar file, viewmol-2.2.1.src.tgz. Unzip and untar it using gunzip viewmol-2.2.1.src.tgz and tar -xvf viewmol-2.2.1.src.tar. You get three subdirectories, source, man, and examples, four resource files (English, German, Russian, French), Xdefaults.*, and the configuration file viewmolrc. Copy all files you got into an arbitrary directory. If you want to install precompiled binaries, download the appropriate file for your operating system and unpack it from the same directory you unpacked the source code. This will create a subdirectory in the source directory which holds the binaries (the name of this directory starts with the name of your operating system as you get it from uname -s and may contain a CPU specific ending). If you run the supported operating systems you have to set the environment variable $VIEWMOLPATH to point to the directory where you unpacked VIEWMOL (the compiled-in default for VIEWMOLPATH is /usr/local/lib/viewmol) and the installation is complete. Otherwise you have to recompile the program (cf. p. cross reference). The program uses dynamical memory allocation so that every size of a molecule can be handled which fits the hardware limits of your workstation.

The installation directory also contains a file viewmolrc. You might have a look into this file and adapt it to your needs. The format is described at page cross reference. In general the defaults should work fine.

VIEWMOL uses by default English as language, but it has been written so that other languages can easily be usedfootnote. The distribution contains files Xdefaults.<language> which contain all the program messages, menus, dialog boxes etc. in other languages (currently English, German, Russian, and French). If you want to use a different language for a system wide installation, copy the corresponding Xdefaults.<language> file to your applications default directory (usually /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults) and rename it to Viewmol. If you want to use a different language only for some users, instruct them to configure the language through VIEWMOL's Configuration menu. VIEWMOL will run without any of the Xdefaults.<language> files installed. So if you are happy with English and want to change only a few settings you don't need to install any of the Xdefaults.<language> files.

VIEWMOL needs a few external programs for some of its functions. Once you have installed VIEWMOL and set VIEWMOLPATH, you can start VIEWMOL, press Cancel in the file selection box which will appear, and press the right mouse button in the blue VIEWMOL window. A popup menu will appear where the last but one option is Configuration .... Choosing this option displays a dialog where you can set path names to four external programs. These are (including their defaults)footnote:  

Location of Web browser:                    netscape %s
Location of Moloch:                         moloch
Location of Rayshade:                       rayshade
Location of display program for RLE files:  xv %s
If these program are installed and can be found in your path VIEWMOL will automatically display the correct path names in the dialog. The %s is a placeholder for the file name and is required for programs which use command line arguments. Once you have set these path names, choose Save from the buttons in the dialog and these settings will be stored permanently in $HOME/.Xdefaults.



Jörg-Rüdiger Hill
Sun May 16 15:38:11 PST 1999