Hi Mike, Chimera currently only supports one preferences file, so the simplest would be to copy a default preferences file to the user's preferences location. You could either do it when you setup the accounts, or modify the Chimera startup code in CHIMERA/share/__main__.py or CHIMERA/share/chimeraInit.py to do it if there isn't one already. Analogously, you could disable the code that checks for updates in CHIMERA/share/chimeraInit.py, ie., comment out the call to tkgui.periodicCheckForNewerChimera. HTH, Greg On 10/03/2012 09:52 AM, mike _ wrote:

I wish to deploy a Chimera installation across multiple machines for multiple users. For obvious reasons the users will not have write permission on the application directory. In this scenario Chimera's default behaviour of regularly checking for updates is unhelpful so I wish to disable it.

Having read http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/UsersGuide/preferences.html#Preferences I assumed I could disable the update checking by putting a suitable preferences file in the application directory and then having users invoke Chimera in such a way that preferences file is found. That works, but generates a warning that the preferences file is read-only (which it is, it's in the application directory) and Chimera seems to only want to use the one preferences file. So the result is that users can't save any preferences.

Is there any way to make Chimera read a global preferences file that contains some useful defaults and also allow each user to have their own preferences file?

thanks,

mike