Re: [ccp4bb]: dial box and crystal eyes for Linux?

[Ethan Merritt <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

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On Friday 18 January 2002 12:25, Bart Hazes wrote:
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> We use the NuVision 60GX hardware stereo setup to run Xfit on Linux. It
> works well. For more details check out
> http://eagle.mmid.med.ualberta.ca/tutorials/xfit-nuvision.html
>
> I don't think there is a dial box that works on Linux but I haven't seen
> anyone use a dial box on an SGI in years either (but I must confess I
> haven't used and SGI in years except for the odd showcase session). My
> feeling is that for most/all purposes the mouse is perfect to move your
> model around.

I have a dial box that works under linux. It's a Spectragraphics model 
that originally came with a (now defunct) DEC workstation.  It just plugs
into a serial port, and you run a little daemon that listens to the serial
port and reports the current dial settings to any program that asks.

It's thoroughly useless, though, because there are no application programs
that are set up to use this mechanism.  I considered modifying Xfit to 
talk to it, but gave it up as being both a lot of work and anyway pointless.
As Bart says, everyone seems to do OK with the mouse. [Good 3-button mice
are getting harder to find also, but that's a separate problem]

The proper fix would be to add the dialbox to X11 as an extension, so that 
standard X library calls would work. But that's way more work than I'm 
willing to consider.

-- 
Ethan A Merritt       merritt@u.washington.edu
Biomolecular Structure Center Box 357742
University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195
phone: (206)543-1421
FAX:   (206)685-7002