[PyMOL] erratic graphics performance and GNOME vs KDE terminals

Hi everyone

I have a couple of observations/problems, more in the irritating rather
than serious category, but which I'd still like explanations for.

1.  I have a Dell Precision machine with Nvidia graphics which generally
works extremely well with Pymol.  It's recognised like this

 OpenGL based graphics front end:
  GL_VENDOR: NVIDIA Corporation
  GL_RENDERER: Quadro2 MXR/AGP/SSE2
  GL_VERSION: 1.3.1 NVIDIA 29.60

and is wonderfully fast.

Occasionally, however, I start pymol and it's clear that the hardware
acceleration isn't there - everything works but *slowly*.  Sometimes just
starting Pymol from a different terminal does the trick, sometimes not.
Any explanations for this?  I can't see any common factors in the
situations where I've seen this behaviour.

2.  Today, facing this problem, I was getting nowhere trying differnt
(Konsole) terminals so I thought - what about trying a Gnome terminal.  I
did and the whole machine froze completely immediately after I pressed
return.  Had to reboot.

Any thoughts much appreciated.

Daniel Rigden

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