Hi Geoff, We will be making a Chimera release in then next week or two possibly as early as this Friday. We have been testing an Aqua version of Chimera (no X server needed) but have encountered about a dozen problems with the Tk windowing toolkit on Aqua that Chimera uses. We are still considering whether to release an Aqua version or an X windows version. If we decide to continue with an X windows Chimera on the Mac then I will look into how OpenOffice starts the X server if it is not yet started. I agree that the current Mac Chimera behaviour where no error is shown when you don't first start the X server is bad. The tutorials on our web site describe our development version of Chimera that has not been released. We may have it up on the web because people at UCSF have access to that newer Chimera. I'll see if we can keep the current Chimera release manuals on the web. Your Chimera distribution came with the manuals and tutorials. If you go to the Chimera Help menu and select User's Guide the web browser will show the copy that came with your Chimera distribution which should be completely consistent (same menus, ...) with that version of Chimera. We do not have a Chimera mailing list. This next release is the first official release (may still be a beta release on the Mac platform) and it makes sense to look into setting up a mailing list. Tom