MOLDRAW: a program to display and manipulate molecular and crystalline structures

by Piero UGLIENGO  University of Torino - Dipartimento Chimica. Via P. Giuria 7 -10125 Torino. ITALY

MS Windows (Linux & Mac OS X) - http://www.moldraw.unito.it  

Running MOLDRAW under Linux

Update: On June 2013, Dr. Marco Lorenz, University of Regensburg, Institute of Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Research Group Theoretical Chemistry (Prof. Schuetz) has succesfully installed MOLDRAW under Ubuntu 13.04 using Wine 1.4.1 following these steps:

1.  Install WINE via the software-center
2.  Download the MOLDRAW-executable
3.  Open a console and install moldraw_setup_xyz (xyz= version number) via wine <foldername>/moldraw_setup_xyz.exe
4.  Start MOLDRAW via the automatically  created desktop-icon or via wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files\ \(x86\)/moldraw/moldraw32.exe

With the modern Wine all the steps reported below for the old version are no longer needed.

Anyhow, it is worth trying and if does not work one can revert to the older/longer procedure below.

MOLDRAW is natively developed using Microsoft Visual Basic 6 under Microsoft Windows operating system.

MOLDRAW can also be run under Linux open source operating system under Wine, an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X and Unix. Because Wine is not a Windows emulator, but a translation layer (a program loader) capable of running Windows applications on Linux and other POSIX compatible operating systems, MOLDRAW running in Wine act as native programs would, running without the performance or memory usage penalties of an emulator, with a similar look and feel to other applications on your desktop.

Recipies to install MOLDRAW under Wine (Release 0.9.11 only has been tested, newer/older versions are not reccomended) are described in the following.

I would like to express my deep gratitude to Alessandro Marello who implemented the needed steps to run MOLDRAW under Wine on a variety of Linux implementations.

Installing Wine 0.9.11

As anticipated above, the Wine 0.9.11 version has been fully tested on a variety of Linux implementation (Debian, RedHat Fedora, Slackware and Suse). Older or newer versions are not reccomended because no tests of the MOLDRAW implementation have been run on them.

However I would be very happy if more experienced Linux users will be able to set up MOLDRAW under newer Wine versions and I would be very pleased to acknowledge their effort here.

As a first step disinstall any previous Wine installation (for instance under Debian type: apt-get remove --purge wine libwine) and remove the .wine directory in the user home (rm -rf ~/.wine).

Then, download the Wine 0.9.11 source package here and decompress the package:

gunzip wine-0.9.11.tar.bz2.gz

tar -xzvf wine-0.9.11.tar.bz2

by moving under the  /tools directory where Wine has been decompressed just type:

./tools/wineinstall

If all the needed files and packages were already present this is all you need to install the Wine package. Please click here for further infos about Wine installation.

Installing Winetools-2.1.2

To complete the Wine environment setup the Winetools package has been used. To dowload the compressed package just click here. The actual Winetools version is the 2.1.2.

Then decompress the package by typing:

tar -xzvf winetools-0.9jo-III.tar.gz

Move to the newly created directory, and with the administrator privileges (issue the su command) type:

./install

At the end of the Winetools installation some fine tuning of the Wine environment should be carried out.

Fine tuning of Wine by Winetools

After finishing the Winetools installation go back to the normal user privileges, otherwise the Winetools utility will not work properly. As a normal user type:

wt2

Just click the OK button until the main Winetools window will appear:

Select Base setup option to enter a second level window:

Now go through the following steps in the sequence below:

• Create a fake Windows drive, will make the ~/.wine directory with the whole set of needed Windows files

• TrueType Font Arial, will install the standard TrueType fonts. In case the link appeared to be broken, the file arial32.exe can be downloaded directly by clicking here or from any other equivalent mirror. After dowloading the file, open a terminal window and issue the command: 

wine <download_directory>/arial32.exe

• DCOM98, component of the Windows system

• Microsoft Foundation Classes 4.0, component of the Windows system

• Internet Explorer 6 SP1 English. This is the largest downloaded file, being around 18 Mb.
  

After that, go back to the main Winetools window and select the Install Windows system software item.

From this window install the following

• Visual Basic 6 Runtine, used by MOLDRAW

• Common Controls 5.0, used by MOLDRAW

If all the previous steps have been undertaken succesfully, the system is now ready for the MOLDRAW installation under Wine as well as to other Windows applications.

Installing and running MOLDRAW under Wine

The first step is to download the executable MOLDRAW setup (called setup_xyz.exe) from here.

Then issue the command:

wine setup_xyz.exe

By following the various steps of the MOLDRAW setup, the program will be installed in the default directory

~/.wine/drive_c/Programme/moldraw

so that to launch it as a Wine application just type:

$ wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Programme/moldraw/moldraw32.exe

Usually at the end of the setup process the MOLDRAW icon  will be created on the desktop under the KDE.

MOLDRAW has been tested under RedHat Fedora Core 3, Mandrake 10.2, Debian and Suse distributions. 

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