metal-organic papers Acta Cryst. (2005). E61, m2001–m2002 doi:10.1107/S1600536805028424 Sohail et al.  [Ni(C 5 H 7 O 2 )(C 4 H 11 NO) 2 ]Cl m2001 Acta Crystallographica Section E Structure Reports Online ISSN 1600-5368 Bis[2-(dimethylamino)ethanol-j 2 N,O](pentane- 2,4-dionato-j 2 O,O 0 )nickel(II) chloride Manzar Sohail, a Kieran C. Molloy, b Muhammad Mazhar, a * G. Kociok-Ko ¨hn b and M. Kaleem Khosa a a Department of Chemistry, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad 45320, Pakistan, and b Department of Chemistry, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, England Correspondence e-mail: mazhar42pk@yahoo.com Key indicators Single-crystal X-ray study T = 150 K Mean (C–C) = 0.005 A ˚ R factor = 0.050 wR factor = 0.137 Data-to-parameter ratio = 19.9 For details of how these key indicators were automatically derived from the article, see http://journals.iucr.org/e. # 2005 International Union of Crystallography Printed in Great Britain – all rights reserved The Ni atom in the title complex, [Ni(C 5 H 7 O 2 )(C 4 H 11 NO) 2 ]Cl, is in a distorted octahedral coordination environment. Cations are linked into centrosymmetric dimers via O—HCl hydrogen bonds involving the OH groups of the 2-(dimethyl- amino)ethanol ligands and the Cl  anions. Comment The title compound, (I), is a synthetic precursor for the possible deposition of nickel oxide thin films through aerosol- assisted chemical vapour deposition (AACVD). The mol- ecular structure of complex (I) is shown in Fig. 1, and selected bond lengths and angles are given in Table 1. The complex has a distorted octahedral geometry around the Ni II atom and contains two bidentate chelating dimethyl- aminoethanol groups and a bidentate acetylacetonate group. The N atoms are in mutually trans positions, with an N2— Ni1—N1 angle of 171.43 (10)  . The Ni1—N2 bond length of 2.139 (3) A ˚ is significantly shorter than that of 2.166 (3) A ˚ for Ni1—N1. The Ni—O1, Ni—O2 and Ni—O3 bonds are very similar to the analogous bonds in the related compound [Ni(acac) 2 (dmaeH)] (acac is acetylacetonate and dmaeH is dimethylaminoethanol; Williams et al. , 2001). Not surprisingly, Received 30 June 2005 Accepted 9 September 2005 Online 17 September 2005 Figure 1 The hydrogen-bonded (dashed lines) dimer of the title compound, showing 30% displacement ellipsoids. Atoms labelled with the suffix A are related by the symmetry operator (2  x,1  y,1  z).