Hi James, In general you can run chimera in nogui mode. However, currently there are a few things that can only be done in the GUI mode - I am told this includes any image saving or exporting the scene (povray, renderman, OBJ, VRML, X3D). Sorry about that, Elaine ----- Elaine C. Meng, Ph.D. meng@cgl.ucsf.edu UCSF Computer Graphics Lab and Babbitt Lab Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry University of California, San Francisco http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/home/meng/index.html On Jul 29, 2008, at 9:00 AM, James A. Cleland wrote:

I was wondering if anyone was able to run chimera ‘headless’ using – nogui. I would like to be able to run the program from a script and without an X server, or against Xvfb or equivalent if necessary. My command line is

/var/lib/chimera/bin/chimera --nogui --silent --script <scriptname>

The script that I run sets the window size, element colors, rotates the image, and then does a copy file to save a ray traced PNG file. I have run this without –nogui and accepted the POV Ray license agreement. Adding –nogui results in the following output

Error while processing <scriptname>:

AttributeError: '_chimera.NoGuiViewer' object has no attribute 'x3dWrite'

(see reply log for Python traceback info)

Parse error at line 1:

no element found

My chimera version is “chimera production version 1 build 2540 2008/07/09”. This is running on a linux machine, 2.6 kernel. Any suggestions you have would be appreciated.

Thanks!

James

Thanks to both of you for your input on this issue. I am currently using Xvfb to run Chimera against a headless X server. I believe this is going to work for my application. Thanks again! James -----Original Message----- From: Elaine Meng [mailto:meng@cgl.ucsf.edu] Sent: Friday, August 01, 2008 3:02 PM To: James A. Cleland Cc: chimera-users@cgl.ucsf.edu Subject: Re: [Chimera-users] copy cmd in nogui script Hi James, In general you can run chimera in nogui mode. However, currently there are a few things that can only be done in the GUI mode - I am told this includes any image saving or exporting the scene (povray, renderman, OBJ, VRML, X3D). Sorry about that, Elaine ----- Elaine C. Meng, Ph.D. meng@cgl.ucsf.edu UCSF Computer Graphics Lab and Babbitt Lab Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry University of California, San Francisco http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/home/meng/index.html -----Original Message----- From: Greg Couch [mailto:gregc@cgl.ucsf.edu] Sent: Friday, August 01, 2008 3:07 PM To: James A. Cleland Cc: chimera-users@cgl.ucsf.edu Subject: Re: [Chimera-users] copy cmd in nogui script The only way right now to use the copy command in nogui scripts, is to use the "Linux 64-bit Off-screen OpenGL" version of chimera that you can get from the daily builds, <http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/alpha-downloads.html>. It is "headless" and uses the Mesa software OpenGL implemenation. If you need a 32-bit Linux version, please let me know. It's on my list of things to do, but at a low priority. Greg Couch UCSF Computer Graphics Lab On Tue, 29 Jul 2008, James A. Cleland wrote:

I was wondering if anyone was able to run chimera 'headless' using -nogui. I would like to be able to run the program from a script and without an X server, or against Xvfb or equivalent if necessary. My command line is

/var/lib/chimera/bin/chimera --nogui --silent --script <scriptname>

The script that I run sets the window size, element colors, rotates the image, and then does a copy file to save a ray traced PNG file. I have run this without -nogui and accepted the POV Ray license agreement. Adding -nogui results in the following output

Error while processing <scriptname>:

AttributeError: '_chimera.NoGuiViewer' object has no attribute 'x3dWrite'

(see reply log for Python traceback info)

Parse error at line 1:

no element found

My chimera version is "chimera production version 1 build 2540 2008/07/09". This is running on a linux machine, 2.6 kernel. Any suggestions you have would be appreciated.

Thanks!

James