10 4 / 2012

Finding a libre 2D molecule editor: success!

After much blood, sweat, and tears, I’ve finally gotten gnome-chemistry-utils running on Mac OS X. Yes, really.

Previous tribulations here.

I decided to not make a CMake project because I figured there wouldn’t be Find scripts for most of the dependencies, and I eventually realized that everything I needed had a .pc somewhere.

Major steps to getting it to find the dependencies:

  • I had to give pkg-config several paths:

$ echo $PKG_CONFIG_PATH :/usr/local/share/pkgconfig:/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:/opt/local/share/pkgconfig:/opt/local/lib/pkgconfig

  • goffice 0.9.2 compiled with ./configure -CFLAGS=-DG_CONST_RETURN=const. This has been merged into Macports r91768.

  • Despite the fact that GL/glx.h is in /opt/local/include and gtk+-3.0.pc lists this as an include dir, gnome-chemistry-utils complained about not finding it. I looked in configure.ac and found the following gem:

dnl Not sure we need to test for glx.h AC_CHECK_HEADER(GL/glx.h,,[AC_MSG_ERROR([Error, GL/glx.h not found.])])

I commented out the header check and, uh, it configured fine. (ran aclocal; autoconf; ./configure)

  • make threw the same type of errors goffice was throwing (about G_CONST_RETURN needing stuff before it), so I ended up using the following configure step for gnome-chemistry-utils:

$ ./configure CFLAGS=-DG_CONST_RETURN=const CXXFLAGS=-DG_CONST_RETURN=const

And I’ve got it running!

A few hiccups with importing a molecule: after going to Tools/Import molecule, the Import window was behind the main window. XQuartz is always a bit wonky. In order to paste into the text box, I enabled 3-button mouse mode, and option-click/Paste appears to properly access the OS X copied text.

I haven’t fussed with it too much, but it seems much easier to use than BKchem.

Now of course the question is whether I want to attempt to make a macport for this. The most horrifying part was getting chemical-mime-data to build. I don’t know enough about autoconf to fix the png generation problem, and I don’t even think chemical-mime-data helps OS X at all (I still got “unknown type” errors). I could remove it as a dependency and see if I can get gnome-chemistry-utils to build.

P.S. Appears to crash when I try to save or quit. Hmm.

(gchempaint-0.14:33600): GLib-GIO-ERROR **: Settings schema 'org.gtk.Settings.FileChooser' is not installed

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