Thomas Goddard wrote:
There's no technical obstacle to us making regular 64-bit linux Chimera distributions. The only issue is having time to do it. ... Could you give me a better sense of how much need there is in the Sali lab? Are you really saying you would not install 32-bit Linux system libraries except for Chimera? I would think there are a fair number of applications out there with binary distributions only for 32-bit.
Yes, of course there are a handful of other applications (mostly ancient and unsupported codes) which require a 32-bit glibc. But it's really only Chimera which needs all of the X libraries etc. to get pulled in.
The other problem you point out is that 32-bit Chimera Python cannot use your own 64-bit Python modules. Are you using additional C Python modules within Chimera that do not come with Chimera? That is interesting -- what are they?
We've already discussed using our MODELLER package in combination with Chimera. The next public release of MODELLER will primarily be made available as a Python module, and we are exploring the options for using this directly with Chimera (rather than having it generate input files and run a subprocess). This works just fine for 32-bit, but not for x86_64 unless we build Modeller as a 32-bit application. Given the large performance boost we've seen for our x86_64 builds vs. i386, we are rather reluctant to do that. Ben -- ben@salilab.org http://salilab.org/~ben/ "It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data." - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle