[vtkusers] Building VTK for XDarwin

[Marcel Prastawa]

On Wednesday, February 27, 2002, at 01:12 , Robb Brown wrote:
> Thanks, this worked perfectly.  Marcel is right though -- it is very slow.
>   Why is this?  Is it an XDarwin issue or something wrong with X in 
> general?

It's a problem with the XFree86 server for Darwin/OS X. It currently only 
supports software rendering, so it does not take any advantage of your 
video card's abilities. The commercial X servers (ex: Tenon) supports 
hardware accelerated OpenGL, but it's rather unstable.

> What is the current state of the art in OSX VTK graphical interfaces? 
> There is a version of Tk for OSX (Quartz) now and Python has been made to 
> (at least somewhat) work with it.  Has anybody gotten the VTK-Python-Tk 
> combination to work?

Tkinter on Quartz is still unstable. I am using the VTK-Python-Tk combo on 
OS X by running Tk on X-Windows and VTK on Quartz. You'll need separate 
windows for the GUI and the VTK display with this setup. It's not the best 
solution, but it works OK.

Marcel