Hi!!
I am running Houdini aprentice on Fedora 7 and i´m having and odd problem. After running it for no more than a couple of minutes Houdini hangs and send me directly to the user log in. It does it always, no matter what operation i am doing or how heavy the scene is. Does anyone know what the problem can be??
Cheers!

First thought is that X is crashing. What video card and driver are you using?

Cheers,

J.C.

Thanks for the reply JColdrick! The video card is a PNY Quadro FX 560 and i havent installed any drivers yet, just using the default ones so far. Is that the reason why X/houdini hangs??, should i install new drivers??
Cheers!

I've long since stopped keeping up with Nvidia's products(I revisit when purchasing), but certainly seeing quadro in the title is a good sign - as a rule they give you the least grief.

I'm not sure what you mean by the default drivers - if you mean the one that shipped with the Linux distro, then you need to get nvidia's drivers, check on their web site.

The second guess is that since you're running a fairly new release(FC7), there might be driver issues that haven't been ironed out yet. That's sort of a throwaway response, though, doesn't really help. Certainly crashing X isn't something that should be happening, ever. Typically, though, an application itself shouldn't be capable of doing that, unless it's triggering a bug in the drivers. First I'd ensure you've installed the NVidia drivers first, and check the net for issues with FC7 and those.

Cheers,

J.C.

seems like an odd problem. Like JC said, probably due to the fact that FC7 is a bit new. You could try

- install the nvidia proprietary drivers (not a clue how easy this is on FC) - better do this after checking out the rest of the checks
- check /var/log/Xorg.0.log.old on any messages (errors)
- check /var/log/messages.whatever for errors
- check if what opengl settings you are using
- what happens when you start houdini and then go on a two hour coffee break? Does it still crash your x-session?
- ldd on hmaster whatever to see if all the libraries are there
- what version of glibc, and gcc are you using?
- did you recently crossed the path of black cats, walked under ladders, or were you cursed by some witch…

If you give a bit more info we could narrow down the problem

(As side note i am trying to get the proprietary nvidia drivers installed on my dad's puter and so far has taken me three weeks and no luck…some distros try to do things differently although they say the are LSB compatible)

Happy bug hunting

To best make use of Fedora Seven with Houdini & nvidia graphic cards, I suggest that you go to http://rpm.livna.org/rlowiki/LivnaSwitcher [rpm.livna.org] & follow their advice. This worked for me with Nvidia Quadro cards, not sure about ATI.

The free “nv” driver has had problems with Houdini in the past. Using the “nvidia” driver is your best bet. You can check which one you're using by looking in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file (I think that's where FC7 puts it).

It should be pretty straightforward to install on FC7. On Debian, you need module-assistant installed, and then you run “m-a a-i nvidia”.

Hello to all!!

I know that is an old post, but I'm writting now, because I've just installed the Houdini Apprentice 9.1, in Fedora 8 and I had the same problem related above.
Fisrt, I had problems with the video driver. Using the open source ATI driver from Fedora, Houdini crashed every time. I replaced it with the ATI Prorpietary Driver and Houdini got very stable, but, unfortunately, after some random opperartions it suddenly crashes and take me to the Fedora user login window.

Have anyone found a solution for that problem???

I'm on a notebook Compaq Presario X6000 - Pentuim 4 HT - 2 Gb Ram - ATI Mobility Radeon X 600 (video card) - Fedora 8 installed.

Thanks a lot!!!

PS: Sorry for the bad english!!!