[Chimera-users] non-GUI use of Chimera

[Randy Heiland]

I am evaluating Chimera as a tool for providing (pseudo-interactive) vis
functionality from a web server and therefore would like to use it in a
non-gui mode.  I saw the earlier post/reply to this list (May 4) on this
topic, and Eric indicated that one way to do this was to put all your
cmds in a file then run "chimera --nogui <cmd-file>".  Obviously this
isn't ideal for my purposes.  So, I'm wondering what the alternatives
are?  I'm a newbie to Chimera, but I've read how it was based on Midas,
and so I decided to see how far I could get in reading in a pdb file
and... I didn't get very far:

(after install Chimera (Linux, beta 1 build 1951), plus dependent Python
pkgs)
%python
>>> import chimera
>>> import Midas
>>> f=Midas.open('foo.pdb')

and I get an error about 'missing default material' and realize I'm
doing the wrong thing anyway.  

Basic question: can I, from the Python interpreter, use Chimera/Midas to
read in a pdb file and do basic Chimera functionality?  For now, I don't
even care if it assumes X is running and pops up windows.

Thanks, Randy