I am evaluating Chimera as a tool for providing (pseudo-interactive) vis functionality from a web server and therefore would like to use it in a non-gui mode. I saw the earlier post/reply to this list (May 4) on this topic, and Eric indicated that one way to do this was to put all your cmds in a file then run "chimera --nogui <cmd-file>". Obviously this isn't ideal for my purposes. So, I'm wondering what the alternatives are? I'm a newbie to Chimera, but I've read how it was based on Midas, and so I decided to see how far I could get in reading in a pdb file and... I didn't get very far: (after install Chimera (Linux, beta 1 build 1951), plus dependent Python pkgs) %python
import chimera import Midas f=Midas.open('foo.pdb')
and I get an error about 'missing default material' and realize I'm doing the wrong thing anyway. Basic question: can I, from the Python interpreter, use Chimera/Midas to read in a pdb file and do basic Chimera functionality? For now, I don't even care if it assumes X is running and pops up windows. Thanks, Randy