Dear Greg,
After installing nvidia graphics drivers, i am not able to open chimera. I have attached the xconfig file and the output of glxinfo as text files.

[cbala@ramana ~]$ chimera
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/chimera/share/__main__.py", line 65, in <module>
    value = chimeraInit.init(sys.argv)
  File "/usr/local/chimera/share/chimeraInit.py", line 361, in init
    tkgui.initializeGUI(exitonquit, debug_opengl)
  File "CHIMERA/share/chimera/tkgui.py", line 2525, in initializeGUI
  File "/usr/local/chimera/lib/python2.5/site-packages/PIL/__init__.py", line 309, in checkConfig
   
  File "/usr/local/chimera/lib/python2.5/site-packages/Togl.py", line 27, in __init__
    Tkinter.Widget.__init__(self, master, "togl", cnf, kw)
  File "/usr/local/chimera/lib/python2.5/lib-tk/Tkinter.py", line 1930, in __init__
    (widgetName, self._w) + extra + self._options(cnf))
_tkinter.TclError: could not create rendering context
Couldn't configure togl widget

I installed the nvidia driver as follows. I installed it based on the information given in the nvidia install guide in the following link.

http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-nvidia.html#pci_id

su -c 'rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm'
su -c 'rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm'
su -c 'rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmfusion-*'
su -c 'yum install kmod-nvidia'

Then i gave the following command

nvidia-xconfig  as root. Then i restarted the system. Now i am able to see nvidia display setting. When i give chimera, it dosent work.

Bala

On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 8:44 PM, Greg Couch <gregc@cgl.ucsf.edu> wrote:
Looking at your chimera benchmark scores and at the scores on the web page, http://socrates2.cgl.ucsf.edu/trac/chimera/wiki/benchmarks, it looks like you don't have the NVidia graphics driver installed.  And that would make a *huge* difference.  To double-check, run the glxinfo command and look at the "OpenGL renderer string:" line, it should have NVIDIA in it instead of Mesa.  To get the NVidia drivers, go to <http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx>.

        - Greg


On Thu, 7 May 2009, Bala subramanian wrote:

Dear Greg,
You are right. Previously it was normal but now it is slow. I havent updated
the kernel. I checked and noticed that i dnt have any memory intensive
background jobs also.

I did benchmarks with two chimera versions 1.3 (attached file chim_test) and
chimera 1.4 (attached chim_test1).
My graphics card is nVIDIA GETFORCE 9300MG, VRAM: 256 MB. I dnt know how to
compare and judge what is going wrong. I wud appreciate your help on the
same.

Thanks,
Bala

So it was formerly fast on the same computer?  This could happen on a Linux
computer if you updated the kernel and forgot to reinstall the graphics
driver (from ATI or NVidia, the open source 3D drivers still need work, but
are improving).  Another possibility, on all operatings sytems, is that
there is a background process that is using a lot of CPU or memory, so
chimera doesn't have the resources it used to.

If you just want to check the graphics performance, then you can use the
Benchmark tool in Tool / Utilities to guage the current performance.  And
then you can compare to the reported scores to see if your graphics
performance is reasonable (the Show button in the Benchmark tool brings up
the web page).

      - Greg