o.h.weiergraeber@fz-juelich.de wrote:
A question to the chimera developers:
Having used chimera for several years on IRIX and Linux machines, we can say it is maybe the most useful tool available for molecular visualization and related purposes.
Thank you for the kind words.
However, most important (freeware) packages in the field of x-ray crystallography have also become available as Solaris(x86) versions over the past few years. In my opinion it is quite an attractive platform mainly because it avoids all the confusions and incompatibilities arising from the multitude of distributions in the Linux world. Thanks to the overall conceptual similarity to Linux compilation should (in principle) not run into tremendous problems. I would try myself, but the source code available is not complete afaik :(
Porting difficulties are the main reason that the complete Chimera source has not been put up on the web. Although the code that we've developed is standard C++ and compiles on many platforms, we also use a large variety of "foreign" packages (Tcl/Tk, Python, Tix, Numpy, antechamber, MMTK, povray, just to name a few). We've had some difficulties in porting to our supported platforms (Windows, Linux and MacOSX) so we're hesitant about putting others through the same grind.
So, are there plans for a Solaris version of chimera in the near future? In previous discussions on this mailing list I found there are even some Solaris-related comments in the source code ;)
Our supported platforms were selected mainly based on availability and demand. That is, we support platforms that are fairly widely available, and a number of users have requested for the port. For example, we currently have a number of requests for a 64-bit MacOSX port now that Leopard is out, so we'll probably put in some effort into that. If you can get the word out to the Solaris community to let us know that they want Chimera ported, then we may add Solaris onto our target platform list as well. Conrad