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:
Hi Tom, Thanks for the information. That sounds fair enough - ppc architecture will be less important soon and even now only a small proportion of linux users use that architecture. I have one more thought about support for different platforms though. Could you have a binary just for the msms molecular surface calculation package, and then the other packages as source plus makefiles. That would probably be much less work for you, and then whoever wanted to spend the time trying to get it to work could do, but you wouldn't have to be involved or support it in any way? You might even find others identify and fix problems on these new platforms - saving work for the Chimera team. Just a thought. Thanks for your consideration. Alex