Subject: IRIX 6.2+ and MSC's XMOL

From: [email-masked] (Joe Golab)
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 08:10:01 -0600

Dear CCL:

Recently, we upgraded our Silicon Graphics equipment to IRIX 6.2.  After
that, Xmol stopped working (% xmol - Exec format error) because Xmol uses
the COFF binary format.  According to Xmol's creators (Minnesota's SC),
"There are not plans to produce a new XMol distribution".

We have been looking for an alternative to Xmol.  So far, we haven't had
much luck to duplicate Xmol's "Extras/Animate" feature.  We have found that
feature very useful when looking at optimization runs, IRC runs, etc.  The
animation button basically reads and displays a series of geometries from an
Xmol input file.

Can anyone suggest an alternative software product for UNIX machines?
We have tried Rasmol and have not had any luck getting it to do animation
using a series of separate geometries.  (Which should not be taken as a slam
to Rasmol which we have found useful for Web presentations.)

If any replies are received, I'll post the summary.  Thank you.

-- 

:Joe
 [email-masked]
 (630) 961-7878  <SOCON 231 7878>

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From: "Andrew Dalke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 12:01:14 -0600

Hello,

[email-masked] asked:

> Can anyone suggest an alternative software product [to xmol]
> for UNIX machines?

   This seems to be a common question lately as more and more
people upgrade to 6.x .  You might want to look at our visualization
program, VMD, at http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/ .  It was
developed for, amoung other things, the visualization of MD
trajectories.

  I doesn't read XYZ files directly, but if you have Babel
installed (http://mercury.aichem.arizona.edu/babel.html) it VMD
will call it and to the conversion to a set of PDB files automatically,
then read them in.  To the user, you wouldn't even notice the exchange.

						Andrew
						[email-masked]