ChimeraX crashes on start-up

[18111510056@…]

Begin forwarded message:

From: 胡玉霞 via ChimeraX-users <chimerax-users@…>
Subject: [chimerax-users] What to do if chimerax encounters a problem that cannot be opened？
Date: September 1, 2022 at 2:34:01 AM PDT
To: chimerax-users@…
Reply-To: 胡玉霞

Greetings.

Thank you for the great work you have done for ChimeraX development to meet the research needs of the majority of researchers. Recently, I have encountered a problem with the ChimeraX, when I open the software I have the following prompt and then the software does not work properly. So I would like to ask if there is an update for ChimeraX (the version I am using is macChimeraX-1.4.dmg, my computer system is macOS Monterey 12.1) or if I need to download the appropriate plugins and where can I download the plugins?

Thanks for reading the email and I look forward to hearing from you.

Yuxia Hu
Fudan University

[Tom Goddard]

Screen shot of crash report from Yuxia.

[Tom Goddard]

That crash report says the Mac graphics driver crashed. I've never seen that on an M1 Mac in the past 2 years since they have been out. The error also says texture descriptor has width zero. I'm not sure if means it was trying to create a 0 width window image, in any case that should not crash.

First think I would suggest is updating your macOS 12.1 to the current macOS 12.5. The graphics driver comes with macOS and maybe a newer graphics driver will fix this.

The second thing is that maybe the trouble is caused by some ChimeraX preferences setting. You can try moving your ChimeraX preferences so that ChimeraX starts with factory defaults.

mv ~/Library/Application\ Support/ChimeraX ~/Library/Application\ Support/ChimeraX.previous

then try starting ChimeraX.

[Tom Goddard]

Yuxia reinstalled and deleted preferences and got ChimeraX working.

Begin forwarded message:

From: 胡玉霞
Subject: Re: Re: [chimerax-users] What to do if chimerax encounters a problem that cannot be opened？
Date: September 5, 2022 at 7:36:12 PM PDT
To: "Tom Goddard"

Thanks for all your suggestions, I tried updating the system version to macOS 12.5 and it didn't work. Because I had deleted the corresponding program (as well as the ChimeraX preferences setting file) when the software error occurred previously, changing the system preference did not apply, but I found that trying to install it a few more times and moving the ChimeraX preferences after a new error file was generated was able to install it successfully and open it normally. Thanks again!