Here's an an overview of possible new platforms for Chimera distributions. Currently we distribute Chimera binaries for: Windows (x86, 32-bit app) Mac OS X (PPC, requires X windows) Linux (x86, 32-bit) SGI Irix Alpha Tru64 Additional platforms that we do not currently distribute for are: Mac OS X Aqua (PPC, no X windows) Mac OS X, Intel Linux 64-bit kernel Windows 64-bit Linux, PPC There are two obstacles to supporting a new platform. We want to have the target system in our lab for building and testing. This is the case for all our current distributions. And we have to put in work to build the following 28 third-party packages that Chimera uses: TclTk Togl Tix Pmw PyOpenGL zlib Python Numeric jpeg tiff freetype Imaging netcdf Scientific MMTK HappyDoc tr openssl ftgl omni msms otf autostereo swish-e FFmpeg al2co expat qhull And we will update versions of these third party packages and will have to get them to work on all distributed platforms in the future. Currently it is not possible for outsiders to compile Chimera. One reason is that one package, msms molecular surface calculation, cannot be distributed. But the real practical obstacle is that it would take some debugging to successfully compile all the third-party packages on a new platform. Chimera has makefiles to build all the third-party packages but a few of them are likely to fail to build on any new platform and some building expertise will be needed to resolve the problems. Here are a few comments on the possible new platforms. We have built Mac OS X Aqua versions of Chimera. Because of many problems with the Tk window toolkit we did not distribute it. That was 2 years ago and many of the problems may be fixed. We have built 64-bit Linux versions of Chimera. The 32-bit linux Chimera will run on those machines. The reason for building a 64-bit version is to handle very large data sets (> 4 Gbytes). The 64-bit pointers are needed to have an address space bigger than 4 Gbytes. The large data sets are primarily density maps. The Mac OS X Intel platform will become important in under a year and we will have to support it. The Linux PPC platform seems likely to become less common with Apple no longer producing PPC machines in the near future. I'm not sure there are enough potential Linux PPC Chimera users to make supporting this platform worthwhile. In summary, I think Mac Aqua and Mac Intel are the next 2 platforms we are likely to support. Tom