The major drawback are graphic drivers. Mesa is essentially still unuseful. However, MAIN has been tested on "3D Prophet II MX" (XFree 4.0, RedHat 7.0) and "3D Prophet II ULTRA" (XFree 4.0, SuSe 7.0) graphics boards using n-VIDIA driver. The "MX" graphics is already good enough, whereas the "ULTRA" substantially beats on performance workstation graphic boards.
RedHat version is downloadable, wheras for the others get in touch.
Silicon Graphics LINUX loader unfortunately could not build the executable. Until the SG LINUX bug is not fixed, there will be no MAIN for it unfortunately.
MAIN release will stay for a while at the mark 2000, although the year 2001 is already here.
Plot command and RASTER3D interface
Everything connected to polygonal images (bond and map sticks, atom balls, map areas, point 3angles) and labes (atom, residue, segment, sequence names and history objects) can be now transformed into raster3d files, which can be then rendered with RENDER3D into tiff images.
Label processing is done by a new Perl based script MAIN:prog/r3d_labels.pl, which can read the labels from a r3d file and transforms them in thin 3D objects - input for RENDER3D. Useful in particular for generation of stereo images.
To get in RASTER3D interface IMAGE PLOT command was modified (MAIN_COM:image.html). See also the example file ("MAIN_COM:re_image_raster_3d.cmds").
SELECT SEQUENCE now supports multiple sequence IDs as well as ranges. The trouble, however, is that the old commands are still procxessed, but the MEANING has changed.
select seq A1 A10 end
now means
select seq A1 .o seq A10 end
In order to get back the residue range
select seq A1 : A10 end
has to be used. The advantage is that now long ".or. seq" commands are not necessary anly longer and can be written out as
select seq A1 : A10 B78 C89 C90 end