Subject: RasMol this time

From: Joe Leonard <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 02 Mar 2002 09:14:36 -0500

Folks, I'm interested in learning where the "best version" of Rasmol is for
Linux.  I've found/built OpenRasmol (from www. openrasmol.org), and it
works after some tweaking with the Makefile.  Are there better/newer versions
of the source I should be using?

Also, are there alternatives to Rasmol?  There are some annoying "doesn't
do's" with the menus and I'd really rather not do X/Motif programming :-)....

Thanks!

Joe

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From: "Warren L. DeLano" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 2 Mar 2002 08:18:17 -0800 (PST)

Joe,

There are a number of free viewers out there now

http://homepages.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/marc.saric/molmod1.html
http://molvis.sdsc.edu/visres/index.html

but there is only one free program that provides professional-quality
visualization and coarse modeling under a completely unrestrictive
open-source license, and thats PyMOL.  

http://pymol.sf.net

In addition to being a great viewer, PyMOL has a 3D molecular builder, 
interactive molecular modeling (like Sculpt), full support for
macromolecular structures and crystal symmetry, a scripting language, a
Python API, an integrated ray-tracer, Molscript-quality ribbons, animation
capabilities, fitting, mutagenesis, electron density, surfaces, and so
on.  Plus, it is cross-platform (Windows, Unix, Mac) via OpenGL.  It was
developed on Linux using nVidia graphics cards, so it runs great there.

Disclaimer: I am the author, and well-known to be biased, but I think
PyMOL provides much more functionality than RasMOL under a software
license that is suitable for both academic and commercial applications.

Cheers,
Warren