Nanodesigner v0.1.2

Release Notes.

Last revised: February 20, 2006.

Contents.

Introduction

System requirements

Recommended hardware

Software

Installation

Windows OS

Linux distributions

Known issues

Documentation

More information

Introduction.

Nanodesigner is a free, open source, software tools platform intended for the design of atomic structures from the ground up, atom-by-atom, molecule by molecule. Nanodesigner is written in the Java programming language.

System requirements.

Recommended hardware

Processor

Memory

Video card

Virtual memory

Disk space

Software

Nanodesigner needs Java v1.5 or higher to run:
Nanodesigner uses the vecmath.jar library which is part of Java3D.
The latest version of vecmath (1.3.2) is included in the release.
Nanodesigner also needs Java bindings for OpenGL (JOGL) libraries to run.
The latest version of the JOGL libraries (JSR 231 beta 2) are included in the release.

Installation.

Windows OS

Nanodesigner has been tested on Windows2000, XP and XP 64bit (in WOW).
The installation is fairly straightforward:

Install a Java environment v1.5 or higher, if not already available on your system, by downloading JRE or JDK v1.5 or higher (see System requirements/Software above). In case of a JDK installation put the installation directory in the environment variable $JAVA_HOME.
Choose a directory on your hard disk and unzip the content of Nanodesigner-0.1.2-win.zip into this directory. A subdirectory Nanodesigner-0.1.2 will be created.
Create the environment variable NANODESIGNER and set it to: path_to\Nanodesigner-0.1.2
Run the program by typing nanodesigner in a DOS window in the directory path_to\Nanodesigner-0.1.2, or, create a shortcut on your desktop to nanodesigner.bat in this directory.

Linux distributions

Nanodesigner has been tested on the RedHat Fedora distribution.

Install a Java environment v1.5 or higher, if not already available on your system, by downloading JRE or JDK v1.5 or higher (see System requirements/Software above). In case of a JDK installation put the installation directory in the environment variable $JAVA_HOME.
Choose a directory on your hard disk and unzip the content of Nanodesigner-0.1.2-linux.zip into this directory. A subdirectory Nanodesigner-0.1.2 will be created.
Create the environment variable NANODESIGNER and set it to: path_to/Nanodesigner-0.1.2
Run the program by typing nanodesigner.bash in a terminal window in the directory path_to/Nanodesigner-0.1.2.

Known Issues.

Performance

Performance largely depends on the hardware the program is running on. Nothing much is done towards optimization yet so the size of the molecules that can be displayed is limited. Small molecules up to a couple of 1000's of atoms can be displayed without a problem. Performance is best in wireframe display mode. In general performance seems a bit slower on Linux than on Windows systems.