Subject: Re: CCL:(Sad) news about insightII on Linux

From: Malcolm Gillies <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 06 Apr 2001 11:03:53 +0200

I'd like to respond to a couple of technical points in Dr Haney's post.

> Sorry I'm late here.  InsightII was never intended to work over X,
> and it does not work very well between SGI's.  It was somewhat of
> an accident that InsightII worked between SGI's but it required the
> GL service.  Instead of creating true X support for InsightII they
> created this stripped down version -axxess.  While the GL verion
> works reasonably well between SGI's, if you do any significant
> screen updates, it is very slow.  

With 100Mbps ethernet and faster, I suspect this is less of a problem.
While I admit I am accustomed to slow machines, I have regularly used
Insight and Sybyl via a remote (SGI) display and been quite comfortable.

For the past five years or so, Insight has supported OpenGL. As far
as I know, the old SGI GL protocol (which uses a separate port for
network connections) is now fully deprecated. OpenGL is supposed
to be standardised (i.e., not just for SGI machines), and runs happily
over an X protocol connection using the GLX protocol. This is *not*
- -axxess, and is the default mode of operation when connecting remotely
> from one SGI to another (and presumably to any other supported
platform, if there are any).

> Tripos does support full Sybyl over true X (it runs on a Linux system
> fine).  While this is a nice feature, it also suffers from slow
> speeds if there are many screen updates.

I'm not sure what you mean by "true X". Tripos supports various types
of remote OpenGL displays. Last I checked Xfree86 on Linux was not
mentioned explicitly, but it does seem to work pretty well.

By my reasoning (and in the absence of any information from MSI), the
non-compatibility of Insight with remote displays is the result of
a dependence on some unusual features of the SGI OpenGL implementation,
unsupported by Xfree86. That is, if it is not a simple matter of
ignorance, sloppiness or obstruction... ;-)

It would be nice if someone from MSI could fill the information
vacuum, otherwise we will have to wait until some adventurous soul
takes a debugger in hand and investigates further.

cheers,

Malcolm
--
Malcolm Gillies <[email-masked]>
Post-doctoral researcher
Organic Chemistry, Dept of Chemistry,
Technical University of Denmark