Server and Client machines with different OS
Hello, I know that it is possible to open one or several pdb files on a linux machine using a system command line like "> chimera [options] [input1 input2 ...]". My question is: Is it possible to use this command on a linux server to display chimera on a Windows client machine? Thank you very much in advance for your help. Best Regards. Isabelle
Hi Isabelle, I have not tried to run Chimera on Linux with display on Windows. It may be possible by installing an X server on Windows such as Xming, or by using a remote desktop display program. Both of these solutions may fail because they do not correctly mirror the OpenGL 3-d graphics. For example, using the remote desktop display program VNC does no work for this reason. I expect it will be difficult to find a method that works. Why do you want to do this? Why not run Chimera on Windows directly? Tom
Dear Isabelle and Tom, I've run chimera on a Linux server with display on Windows some time ago and I used the Exceed 3D package to visualize. It works but it was quite slow. Bye, Gabor -- Gabor Papai IGBMC Department of Structural Biology and Genomics 1, rue Laurent Fries, BP 10142 67404 Illkirch, France phone +33-3-88655748 Fax +33-3-88653201 E-mail: papai@igbmc.u-strasbg.fr
On Nov 28, 2007 8:59 AM, Tom Goddard <goddard@cgl.ucsf.edu> wrote:
Hi Isabelle,
I have not tried to run Chimera on Linux with display on Windows. It may be possible by installing an X server on Windows such as Xming, or by using a remote desktop display program. Both of these solutions may fail because they do not correctly mirror the OpenGL 3-d graphics. For example, using the remote desktop display program VNC does no work for this reason. I expect it will be difficult to find a method that works.
Actually, VNC has embedded a Mesa GLX Indirect OpenGL rendered in the server for some time now. So you can definite run a VNC server on a Linux box and connect it with vncviewer/tightvnc/realvnc client from Windows. All the rendering is done in software, which can be slow. Also, the X server on Linux (Xorg) embeds VNC protocol. You can connect to a running X server with VNCclient and see what is going on on the screen. This doesn't really work for OpenGL, although if you move the mouse over the OpenGL window, it will do readback and you will see some stuff; it just doesn't work when the OpenGL display changes. As another user pointed out, some X servers for Windows support GLX so they can do remote indirect rendering. Depending on what kind of OpenGL calls you use this can be quite fast. Finally, there is a really nice solution I have experimented with. This is called 'VirtualGL'. VirtualGL acts a shim which catches all of the X11 and OpenGL calls, renders them on the server using the graphics card, then ships them over to the client using compressed image formats. You can connect with TurboVNC or VirtualGL clients. I have used this and the rendering performance is pretty impressive. Dave
On Wed, 28 Nov 2007, Tom Goddard wrote:
Hi Isabelle,
I have not tried to run Chimera on Linux with display on Windows. It may be possible by installing an X server on Windows such as Xming, or by using a remote desktop display program. Both of these solutions may fail because they do not correctly mirror the OpenGL 3-d graphics. For example, using the remote desktop display program VNC does no work for this reason. I expect it will be difficult to find a method that works.
Why do you want to do this? Why not run Chimera on Windows directly?
Tom
Using the Xming-mesa X11 server on Windows and remotely displaying from Linux works reliably for me. It is okay for small structures, but for any real work, I'd run chimera locally on the Windows box and either make local copies of the data or get the data from a Samba fileshare. Good luck, Greg
participants (5)
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David Konerding -
Gabor Papai -
Greg Couch -
Isabelle Vergely -
Tom Goddard