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UCSF ChimeraX is the next-generation visualization program from the Resource for Biocomputing, Visualization, and Informatics at UC San Francisco.

Features

Compared to Chimera, ChimeraX has a more modern user interface, better graphics, and much faster handling of large structures. For more information, see:

Missing Features

ChimeraX has several completely new features compared to Chimera (see advantages), but not yet all of its commonly used capabilities. Most features are implemented as commands only, not (yet) as graphical interfaces, and missing features include dock prep, color key (except command in the daily build), saving and restoring scenes, independent centers of rotation, calculating axes for helices or other sets of atoms, “worms” to show residue attributes, modeling loops and missing segments, combine models, join models, trajectory analysis other than simple playback, calculating RMSD in the current position without fitting (except in the daily build), and many others. Chimera capabilities grew significantly over several years, and likewise, ChimeraX will contain more of these important features as development proceeds.

Although similar in many aspects, ChimeraX is not backward compatible with Chimera and does not read Chimera session files.

Latest Production Release

Production releases are stable platforms for ChimeraX Toolshed bundles to work with. You may need to use an older release if a bundle you wish to use has not been updated yet.

Operating System Distribution Notes
Windows 10 64-bit ChimeraX-1.1.exe
built: 2020-09-10 21:31:12 PDT
committed: 2020-09-09 15:22:27 PDT
size: 300.2 MiB
md5: 0bbf1dee03bb33ee71c2d930ce454794
sha256: 7fed35e29f498466c7559b6f357531ce4f3ed15b1663783b014713b196441460
 Download is a Windows installer.
Tested on Windows 10.
See Windows notes below.
macOS 10.13 64-bit ChimeraX-1.1.1.dmg
built: 2020-10-07 22:51:41 PDT
committed: 2020-10-07 01:32:49 PDT
size: 337.4 MiB
md5: 32a908b72535aeeb4bcdbd8c9d3fff1a
sha256: 2678efba1b11cd9400f2c432189e1b56ee73108f582c6427b13f7f0af5ed2cdb
 Download is a disk image containing the application.
Tested on macOS 10.13. Also works on 10.14, 10.15, and 11.0 (Big Sur).
Generic Linux 64-bit ChimeraX-1.1.tar.gz
built: 2020-09-10 21:42:44 PDT
committed: 2020-09-09 15:22:27 PDT
size: 390.9 MiB
md5: a081f3b964aae69bf7e6f1b3bfc34e1d
sha256: a5f8bc54e55bda7243d49953bf329731ffac173bcb8ca1ed0e55fbf917601bf5
 Download is a tarball of the chimerax application directory.
ChimeraX executable is chimerax/bin/ChimeraX.
See Linux notes below.
Ubuntu 16.04 (Linux) 64-bit ucsf-chimerax_1.1_amd64.deb
built: 2020-09-10 21:58:13 PDT
committed: 2020-09-09 15:22:27 PDT
size: 271.3 MiB
md5: bb69600fcac7fa0034a75bfcb7579fb9
sha256: df06b0b04ce8bbca0a0716a32cc706e6b1c43396f936acbb9055edd05f44f35a
 Download is a Ubuntu 16.04 ucsf-chimerax package. Install on your personal computer with:
sudo apt-get install ~/Downloads/ucsf-chimerax_1.1_amd64.deb
ChimeraX executable is /usr/bin/chimerax.
Ubuntu 16.04 is based on Debian 9, a.k.a. Stretch.
Ubuntu 18.04 (Linux) 64-bit ucsf-chimerax_1.1_amd64.deb
built: 2020-09-10 22:06:35 PDT
committed: 2020-09-09 15:22:27 PDT
size: 274.5 MiB
md5: 2227c651dce8cc6ba061d4f7bf96ecc2
sha256: ec366053fbed539af09c8618cfab8c4d4c18ce8b58d921c77a81de550eb665f3
 Download is a Ubuntu 18.04 ucsf-chimerax package. Install on your personal computer with:
sudo apt-get install ~/Downloads/ucsf-chimerax_1.1_amd64.deb
ChimeraX executable is /usr/bin/chimerax.
Ubuntu 18.04 is based on Debian 10, a.k.a. Buster.
Ubuntu 20.04 (Linux) 64-bit ucsf-chimerax_1.1_amd64.deb
built: 2020-09-10 22:15:00 PDT
committed: 2020-09-09 15:22:27 PDT
size: 282.6 MiB
md5: de1592c31383a099534cec925020562b
sha256: 985e90e369ff8e4d609405947df2abc5815c1d02288317367dcc60841ef0b58e
 Download is a Ubuntu 20.04 ucsf-chimerax package. Install on your personal computer with:
sudo apt-get install ~/Downloads/ucsf-chimerax_1.1_amd64.deb
ChimeraX executable is /usr/bin/chimerax.
Ubuntu 20.04 is based on Debian 11, a.k.a. Bullseye.
Red Hat/CentOS 7 (Linux) 64-bit ucsf-chimerax-1.1-1.el7.x86_64.rpm
built: 2020-09-10 22:25:50 PDT
committed: 2020-09-09 15:22:27 PDT
size: 280.6 MiB
md5: 8724b392fda1c1c45dfb1ea081645f70
sha256: de18d84029ce896227224d10f49adb387bcee67a56be91d5b54fa64d27643716
 Download is a CentOS/RHEL 7 ucsf-chimerax package. Install on your personal computer with:
sudo yum install ~/Downloads/ucsf-chimerax-1.1-1.el7.x86_64.rpm
ChimeraX executable is /usr/bin/chimerax.
Red Hat 8/CentOS 8/Fedora 28+ (Linux) 64-bit ucsf-chimerax-1.1-1.el8.x86_64.rpm
built: 2020-09-10 22:35:11 PDT
committed: 2020-09-09 15:22:27 PDT
size: 269.0 MiB
md5: 5d6ddf62cd7a5d96a825a9703a27edb4
sha256: f0981fe2c0101010690819ec40380e9a991b63b15589f25dc3b7e0c630bd2e68
 Download is a CentOS/RHEL 8 ucsf-chimerax package. Install on your personal computer with:
sudo dnf install ~/Downloads/ucsf-chimerax-1.1-1.el8.x86_64.rpm
ChimeraX executable is /usr/bin/chimerax.

Daily Builds

Daily builds are generated automatically each night from the development source code (see the change log). While a given build may have unforeseen problems, these are often fixed by the next day. Daily builds are both a preview of the next production release and a testbed for prototyping new features and bug fixes.

Operating System Distribution Notes
Windows 10 64-bit
fetching build information...
 Download is a Windows installer.
Tested on Windows 10.
See Windows notes below.
macOS 10.13 64-bit
fetching build information...
 Download is a disk image containing the application.
Tested on macOS 10.13. Also works on 10.14, 10.15, and 11.0 (Big Sur).
Generic Linux 64-bit
fetching build information...
 Download is a tarball of the chimerax application directory.
ChimeraX executable is chimerax/bin/ChimeraX.
See Generic Linux notes below.
Ubuntu 16.04 (Linux) 64-bit
fetching build information...
 Download is a Ubuntu 16.04 ucsf-chimerax-daily package. Install on your personal computer with:
sudo apt-get install ~/Downloads/chimerax-daily.deb
ChimeraX executable is /usr/bin/chimerax-daily.
Ubuntu 16.04 is based on Debian 9, a.k.a. Stretch.
Ubuntu 18.04 (Linux) 64-bit
fetching build information...
 Download is a Ubuntu 18.04 ucsf-chimerax-daily package. Install on your personal computer with:
sudo apt-get install ~/Downloads/chimerax-daily.deb
ChimeraX executable is /usr/bin/chimerax-daily.
Ubuntu 18.04 is based on Debian 10, a.k.a. Buster.
Ubuntu 20.04 (Linux) 64-bit
fetching build information...
 Download is a Ubuntu 20.04 ucsf-chimerax-daily package. Install on your personal computer with:
sudo apt-get install ~/Downloads/chimerax-daily.deb
ChimeraX executable is /usr/bin/chimerax-daily.
Ubuntu 20.04 is based on Debian 11, a.k.a. Bullseye.
Red Hat/CentOS 7 (Linux) 64-bit
fetching build information...
 Download is a Red Hat/CentOS 7 ucsf-chimerax-daily package. Install on your personal computer with:
sudo yum install ~/Downloads/chimerax-daily.rpm
ChimeraX executable is /usr/bin/chimerax-daily.
Red Hat 8/CentOS 8/Fedora 28+ (Linux) 64-bit
fetching build information...
 Download is a Red Hat/CentOS 8 ucsf-chimerax-daily package. Install on your personal computer with:
sudo dnf install ~/Downloads/chimerax-daily.rpm
ChimeraX executable is /usr/bin/chimerax-daily.

Change Log

Platform Notes

Generic Linux Notes
The Generic Linux version does not run on Red Hat/CentOS 7, for those you need to install the CentOS 7 rpm. The Generic Linux version of ChimeraX is compiled on Debian 8 using gcc 4.9. In past, it has worked on newer versions of Ubuntu (≥ 16.04) and Fedora (≥ 25), but that is not regularly tested. Running the generic version will probably require additional libraries and/or older versions of libraries to be installed.

Windows Notes
ChemOffice 2002 supplies an ancient version of the OpenGL library that prevents ChimeraX from starting up. To fix it, you'll need to remove or rename its opengl32.dll file; typically found in "C:\Program Files (x86)\ChemOffice2002\Common\DLLs\opengl32.dll".