- Chimera-users - RBVI Mailing Lists

Chimera benchmarks in both OSX and WinXP on same hardware
by Jeff Speir 08 Jan '07

08 Jan '07

Dear Chimera developers, By request from my lab mates I've run Chimera's built-in benchmark routine under both OSX and Windows XP Pro SP2 for comparison. Attached is an MSWord document with the results. Hope they are useful. Of note, OSX falls behind in the ribbon graphics compared to WinXP, especially with large molecules. The test was done on an Apple Mac Pro (hardware details in attached document) with Windows XP Pro installed via Boot Camp. Both operating systems were fully updated with all available patches. Please let me know if you have any questions. Best Regards, Jeff Jeffrey A. Speir, Ph.D. The Scripps Research Institute Dept. of Molecular Biology 10550 North Torrey Pines Rd. La Jolla, CA 92037 Phone: (858) 784-8646 Fax: (858) 784-8660 E-mail: speir(a)scripps.edu

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OSX headers
by Randy Heiland 04 Jan '07

04 Jan '07

Hi gang, Would it be possible to get the latest OSX (10.4) headers posted at http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/sourcecode.html ? -Randy

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command line zone selection?
by Kenward Vaughan 02 Jan '07

02 Jan '07

I'm putting together a demo for my students this next semester, and was hoping to be able to do a zone selection about the ligand. Is this possible with the command line? I haven't been able to pull out a reference for such, yet. Certainly I could pull together the list of residues myself, but thought it'd be nice to have the command available. Some students might like to create a demo file for their reports, and this would become a pivotal tool for a subset of those. If not directly available, then a wishlist addition, perhaps? Something like: zonesel [within|beyond] [+/- angstroms] [atom-spec] where the sign of the angstrom value denotes whether to include (+) or exclude (-) the atoms in atom-spec. Cheers, Kenward Vaughan -- .'^~;,_ Dr. Kenward Vaughan `:,'~~~~~ Professor of Chemistry \;:/ Bakersfield College |,;| 1801 Panorama Drive / ', \ Bakersfield, CA 93305 / o O \ http://www2.bc.cc.ca.us/kvaughan (oOoOOoOo) ---========--- ???$$MM$$???

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how to change the color and thickness of the unit cell outline
by Sabuj Pattanayek 02 Jan '07

02 Jan '07

Hi, How do I change the color and thickness of the unit cell outline? Thanks, Sabuj

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Re: [Chimera-users] chimera and my ATI card
by Thomas Goddard 29 Dec '06

29 Dec '06

Hi Jeff, The system crash on your laptop indicates it is a graphics driver problem. Unfortunately these are very common -- maybe 1 in 20 driver version / graphics card combinations have Chimera crashing or system crashing bugs. I intend to make a web page that includes all the bad combinations we have encountered -- hopefully I'll get to it in January. The reason Chimera is particularly susceptible to these bugs is that it uses many capabilities of the OpenGL 3-d graphics library -- some that are seldom used by video games and other 3-d applications. There are only 4 practical solutions: 1) update the driver, 2) use an older driver, 3) set driver options to use less OpenGL acceleration, or 4) use a different machine. I use solution 2 on my home machine with an Nvidia Quadro driver that is a dozen versions behind the current one and over a year old. New drivers come out fairly often for both Nvidia and ATI cards and usually do not offer better performance -- only a new set of bugs (old ones fixed, new ones introduced). If you could send us a Chimera bug report by starting Chimera and use menu entry Help / Report a Bug this will send us your graphics driver version so we can include it on our bad drivers page. And if you find another driver version that works I would of course like to know which version. Sorry to offer so little help on this. Tom From: Jeff To: "'Thomas Goddard'" <goddard(a)cgl.ucsf.edu> Subject: chimera and my ATI card Date: Thu, 28 Dec 2006 23:59:26 -0800 hi Tom, on my laptop (IBM T43p), chimera is crashing the machine. I have the latest release installed in WinXP (as of 12/21), and a fairly recent release (within 2006) installed on Linux (also on same machine, different drive). this occurs with both really small volumes (100 cubed) and larger ones (600x400x100 or so), doing common tasks like rotating a surface rendering. in XP, it froze with a required reboot; with Linux, I got the screen that I have attached. the GPU is an 'ATI MOBILITY FireGL V3200', which was one of the GPUs you could get on a 'workstation laptop' back in June '05. I am pretty sure the drivers are current (within '06) and I use the ATI proprietary drivers in both XP and Linux - there is a standard ATI driver package that you download and then it just installs the proper version for your card. On an older laptop (prior to '05) I had similar issues with crashing, also on an ATI card, but different generation (was a Dell purchased in feb. '02). on my desktop workstation with an NVidia card, it works fine, although sometimes surfaces get rendered in the wrong place (something in background looks more in foreground, etc) - but I don't have problems with chimera getting killed (or killing the OS). any thoughts on having it run on my laptop? this machine is the only one I have access to outside of the lab, and was originally bought for this purpose (reconstructions and processing). thanks, -jeff

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Flickering graphics
by Thomas Goddard 22 Dec '06

22 Dec '06

Hi Murali, What kind of flickering do you see when moving maps in Chimera? Does the surface appear shattered? One nvidia graphics driver bug I have seen causes the surface to appear broken into many triangles instead of smooth while it is moved. Or is it tearing that you see? That is when the top half of the screen momentarily shows one position for the map but the bottom shows a different one. That happens because you are moving the model and the redraw is not synchronized to the vertical refresh of the display. That is a graphics driver setting problem. Or does flicker mean it appears like every other frame is black? Every possibility I can think of points to a graphics driver problem, not a Chimera problem. You can check on Linux what graphics driver you are using with the glxinfo command: % glxinfo ... OpenGL vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation OpenGL renderer string: Quadro4 500 GoGL/AGP/SSE2 OpenGL version string: 1.5.2 NVIDIA 66.29 ... The OpenGL renderer and version lines tell you the driver. If it says "Mesa" this means you have no driver installed and it is using software rendering (no hardware acceleration). Usually a new Linux system does not have a graphics driver installed by default so you have to get the driver from the NVidia web site. http://www.nvidia.com/content/drivers/drivers.asp The latest Nvidia GeForce driver version is 9746. The first step to try to fix your problem is update to the newest driver. Tom > Date: Fri, 22 Dec 2006 09:42:43 -0600 > From: "Murali Ayaluru" <mayaluru(a)gmail.com> > To: goddard(a)cgl.ucsf.edu > Subject: flickerings in model > > Hi, > > Greetings! > > I am using Chimera (chimera-1.2304-linux.exe) in Linux (FC-6) environment. > Basically I use this > for visualizing the structures generated from EM. While moving the model > (either vertical or horizontal) and also while rendering the volumes, I saw > lot of flickering in the model. Is there some parameter I have to change > to fix this problem? The graphic card we use is nVidia GeForce 7300 LE. I > don't have much experience in linux OS. Any suggestions to fix the problem > will be highly appreciated. > > Thanks and have a nice day. > > Regards, > Murali

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Benchmark results
by Daniil Zaitsev 19 Dec '06

19 Dec '06

hi - here is benchmark result for new version of Chimera. Original benchmark progress log file is attached. Graphics NVidia GeForce Go 7200 Processor Intel Core Duo T2050 Clock (MHz) 533 OS Type Windows Surface 990 Mesh 368 Contour 148 Solid 173 Recolor 87 Notes Laptop Test Date 12/06 Chimera Version 2304 Machine HP Pavilion dv2000t Graphics Memory (Mb) 128 Main Memory (Mb) 1024 OS Version XP Home Driver Version 8.4.6.4

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compressed versus gzipped Re: Read compressed PDB files -question, suggestion
by Moo Cow 12 Dec '06

12 Dec '06

A thousand pardons. You are right. I phrased the question wrongly. Chimera does open gzip'd files ( xx.gz). It does not open compress'd files (xx.Z). > You can also open gzipped files with Chimera's "open" command or as > an argument as you start Chimera. [...] > > You can use the Chimera File / Open... dialog to directly open a gzip > > PDB file. This was added to Chimera about one year ago. It does not work Why, you may ask, would anyone use compress these days ? If you mirror or rsync the protein data bank, they are still distributing files that have been squashed with compress and have a ".Z" extension. gunzip will happily eat and uncompress these files. I do not know how chimera handles compressed files. If it reads from a pipe, it might be nice to persuade it to feed .Z files to gunzip. I think it might be more difficult if chimera uses the python/zlib interface. Many thanks -- Search for products and services at: http://search.mail.com

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SDF format
by Randy Heiland 12 Dec '06

12 Dec '06

Just wanted to ask about Chimera's support for reading in SDF formatted files, e.g. from PubChem. It seems not to be one of the supported formats. Obviously we can use a converter to get pdb format, but thought I'd ask the experts. Thanks, Randy

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Transparent Ribbon
by Anna Feldman-Salit 12 Dec '06

12 Dec '06

Dear All, From some reason I cannot find the option of making ribbon representation transparent. Can you please give me a hint? Thanks a lot in advance, Anna

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