Protein Explorer (PE) requires the free, powerful MDL Chime plug-in for all of its functions. Without Chime, PE would not have been possible! MDL offers Chime 2 only for Windows and Macintosh. (There is an old SGI version of Chime 0.9z but it does not support PE.) Despite many requests for a linux Chime MDL has declined to offer one. This is beyond our control. Nevertheless PE can be operated very satisfactorily in x86 linux, or in a Windows subsystem, as detailed below.

PE works in Netscape but not Internet Explorer. This is because Internet Explorer does not provide complete support for plugins, and Chime is a plugin. This is beyond our control.

Disclaimer: We have no affiliation with, nor financial interest in MDL Information Systems, Microsoft, Netscape, Codeweavers, VMware, Trelos/Win4Lin, or Citrix/Metaframe. Links to these sites are offered for information only. Please contact us if you know of additional software supporting the operation of Windows or Macintosh OS under other platforms.

• linux
  The following solutions work for linux on an x86 computer only. For linux on other hardware, see unix below.

  • Win4Lin is inexpensive and it supports Protein Explorer, Chime, and Netscape very satisfactorily in our own tests.
    Win4Lin boots Windows in 15 seconds on hardware that takes 90 seconds to boot Windows directly. When Windows crashes, linux survives. Performance (e.g. rotating a molecule) is as fast as on the same hardware in Windows booted directly.

  • VMware is a heavier-duty, more expensive solution, that we are told by reliable sources also works well to support Protein Explorer.
    Performance is likely to be slower than in Win4Lin.

  • Codeweavers' Crossover Plugin (available for $20 in October 2001) makes it possible to run Chime (for Windows) in linux Netscape (without a Windows subsystem). See the details kindly provided by Erik Luijten. At present, Protein Explorer's browser check does not know about this. Therefore, you can bypass browser checking by using a URL with the "no browser compatibility check" query parameter, e.g. pe.htm?nbc=1 documented in PE Query Parameters (linked to the FrontDoor under Constructing hyperlinks to PE. Presently (PE 1.901) Erik reports that PE does NOT work in this mode, but I am willing to collaborate with anyone who wishes to devise workarounds for the places where javascript may be stuck. We have not tested this mode ourselves.

• unix, SGI/Irix, Sun/Solaris, etc.
  If you have fast network access to a Windows NT server, you may wish to investigate the commercial software MetaFrame from Citrix. This software allows most computers to open a window to the NT server in which Protein Explorer runs quite well. This solution has been tested with excellent results at the San Diego Supercomputer Center and the European Bioinformatics Institute.