Hi Duncan,
You are quite right, it is difficult to find the original ftp sites for
programs like RasMol (RasWin) and Kinemage, the most commonly-used public
domain 3D structure viewers. What complicates matters is that much of the
information is outdated, and sites have not kept up.
You can download either of these programs directly from their authors - I've
listed their ftp sites below.
If instead you wish to use a WWW browser to obtain the programs, we (NCBI)
point to both these sites in our Entrez help files "Information about the WWW
3-D Structures Database" which you can find by browsing
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ in the Entrez system.
The Entrez help information will tell you how to set up your WWW browser to
launch these programs automatically. You can use simple queries to search the
3D structure database using Entrez. PDB files are archived at Brookhaven
National Laboratories (http://www.pdb.bnl.gov). A list of network services
relating to 3D structures is provided by NIH
(http://molbio.info.nih.gov/modeling/). I'm not aware of any mirror sites for
PDB data in Europe. EMBL has an FTP site, (http://www.embl-heidelberg.de/)
but it won't let me on at the moment.
Rasmol can be obtained from the author (Roger Sayle) by anonymous ftp to:
ftp.dcs.ed.ac.uk
in the directory /pub/rasmol/
Kinemage can be obtained by anonymous ftp from the authors (Robert M. Weiss
and David C. Richardson) at:
suna.biochem.duke.edu
in the directories:
/pub/MACprograms
/pub/PCprograms (use Windows MAGE_3_3.EXE, avoid MAGE_4_2.EXE)
/pub/UNIXprograms (Sun Kinemage dosen't launch from WWW - yet)
/pub/LINUXprograms
And finally, Brookhaven's ftp site is:
pdb.pdb.bnl.gov
Cheers,
Chris Hogue
NCBI
