on my system (having the fortran USE flag), vmd-1.8.5 tries to link with netcdf. I don't know if it does without fortran. After emerging netcdf, compile finishes fine.
*** Bug 159082 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
correcting the subject line, as I had to explicitly install netcdf to compile vmd
Thanks for pointing this out. vmd should now correctly pull in netcdf and link against it. Best, Markus