Windows 95 and PDB files

Catherine O'Malley (cathyom@tiac.com)
Sat, 17 Feb 1996 15:56:57 -0500

I'd like to tell you how I managed to get the PDB file for my assigned
protein onto my own hard disk, since it was harder to do than it sounds.
What I am about to describe was probably not the easiest or the best way to
do this, but it worked. I already had RasMol (actually RasWin) installed
and Netscape was configured to automatically call it up. I went to

http://www.pdb.bnl.gov/cgi-bin/browse

and called up the text of the PDB file and the image of my protein. For
some reason, Netscape refused to save the text of the PDB file using the
"Save As" command. All I got was a page with one line on it. So, I sent
the text of the PDB file to myself as an e-mail. Then I couldn't get the
image of the PBD file, which I could see in RasMol, saved on my disk.
Finally, after many attempts, I typed the following two lines into the
RasMol command line:

load pdb.**** (where **** is the code for the assigned PDB file)

save C:\rasmol\****.pdb

This worked, believe it or not. What is interesting is that the "save"
command that I wrote into the RasMol command line is not even listed in the
RasMol help file.

As far as I can tell, the RasWin program has only two windows, not three as
described in the PPS96 web pages. I have checked to see if a third window
was hiding somewhere. The Windows95 taskbar only lists two RasWin windows,
and the program seems to be working just fine.

I hope this helps someone because it took me awhile to figure it out. I'd
like to know if anyone else is using Windows95 for the course. Perhaps the
PPS96 web pages could be updated for Windows 95.

Finally, in regard to Procheck--- I'd like to try downloading the program
files as suggested by John Walshaw (i.e. in the source3_3 folder). (By the
way John, thank you for your response.) There are a lot of files so I know
this will take a long time. Can anyone tell me whether all the files should
be downloaded as binary files or ascii files, or whether some files should
be downloaded one way and some another way? The files are listed at

...biochem.ucl.ac.uk/~roman/procheck/confid.doc

Thanks.
Cathy