A friend of mine (Ed Cannon) recently showed me the OpenBabel GUI running on Linux. The surprising thing about this is that OpenBabel currently does not have a Linux version of the GUI (Update 16/Sept/09: Now it does). He was running our Windows release on Linux using Wine, the Windows emulator ("sudo apt-get install wine"). Cool, I thought - I didn't realise that that would even work. Cue blog post.
To get a screenshot I needed Linux. As I described earlier, it's easy (and free) to run Linux on Windows using VMWare Player. This time I installed an Ubuntu 9.04 image. And then (after running "sudo vmware-config-tools.pl") I discovered a new feature called Unity mode. This allows you to use the virtual machine to start Linux applications that appear directly on your Windows desktop (rather than enclosed in a Linux desktop). So I decided to get a screenshot of the Windows OpenBabel GUI running under Wine/Linux together with it running natively on Windows.
The only catch is that I wasn't able to screen capture the Linux application in Windows so in the end, despite all my hard work, I had to Gimp two images together. The resulting image is accurate though, and you can click for a larger version.
The code for the OpenBabel GUI is written with wxWidgets and so is cross-platform already. I don't know whether anybody has compiled it under Linux, but it shouldn't be too difficult.
ReplyDeleteYes - I think it's time we sorted this out.
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