Olex2 is a new crystallographic program born out of the reality that most of the existing small molecule crystallography code is single author and therefore in a situation where it could be lost if that author dies or stops supporting their code. This has happened many times in the past with for me the most memorable time being the tragic death of Dr. Laszlo Zsolnai and the end of xpma. So the olex2 gang got a research grant and have set out to battle all things crystallographic. They’ve started in parallel producing a nice GUI and writing code to do single crystal refinements.

Like all good programmers now-a-days the olex2 guys have their own website where they support all manner of operating systems. So your now wondering why I have written this page and made you read all the way to here to find out?

Linux

(Update I did maintain my own bins for distribution but I’ve stopped) - sorry. Below is partially updated and more for historical reasons. If you want to build your own version of Olex2 rather than grab their rather large 200+MB version it is rather easy to do. But you will also need to grab a version of CCTBX as well.

I’m a Linux fan and olex2 being open source fits nicely with Linux and to the olex2 guys horror I’ve been working with them to remove the window’isms and trying to get a good Linux version. I also build and maintain a primitive Linux installer and the binaries for both the x86_64 and i386 versions of olex2. They’re hosted here on my site which makes it easier for me to keep them updated. They are built from the sourceforge svn at frequent intervals. I also maintain the rather crude Makefile held in the olex2 sourceforge svn.

Linux - RPM

There is now a linux rpm available. To get it go to the debroglie repo follow the “Setup the repository” link. This is getting quite dated now - again my fault I should keep it up to date better.

Currently the rpm is in the testing channel for fedora/centos only. Remember to activate this channel in yumex or yum cmdline to install it, as the channel is disabled by default. If you need help please post to xforum.

Please note that the rpm needs root or sudo permissions to install, like most rpm files do. Whilst the linux installer will install to your user account only. Useful if you are a pleb with now higher powers (which sometimes we all are).

Linux - installer

Over the years the Olex2 team have improved their Olex2 installation for Linux so I no longer need to. I do not personally use their setup preferring to stick to a RPM delivery method built using a MOCK environment. The RPM mentioned above in fact. With that said I haven’t released a new RPM out into the wild for a long time. Mainly because of strange run issues with the test version I had been building whilst trying to implement a more correctly defined storage path for the configuration files.