Hi there,

I searched through google and the houdini forums for an answer to this problem in the subject (textport opens with no prompt) and found some people who have the same issue, but the suggested fixes didn't work for me. When I open a textport pane I get no prompt. If I open it through windows->Hscript textport or alt-T I get the prompt, but if I press enter or any command it disappears. Also the history command shows no history…

When I type prompt I get this:

prompt
prompt ‘`strcat(oppwf(), “ -> ”)`’

seems right, but I'd like the prompt to stay put. I've tried running this through the menu (i'm using Ubuntu 10.10 64b) with the application set to default and also to run in a terminal. I've also launched it directly from a terminal after resourcing the houdini startup file. Same behavior for each course of action. I also tried blowing away my prefs folder in my home directory, but that didn't work either.

Any possible fixes/solutions would be greatly appreciated,
Thanks!

edit: i'm running 11.1.67 64-bit for ubuntu

How are you launching Houdini? There might be problems with this if you launch Houdini from the menu. I can't test because I'm on Windows but I've seen this problem before if Houdini thinks that it's being run non-interactively.

If this happens when you launch Houdini from the menu, then try launching a shell instead. In the shell, the commands to run Houdini is something like this:
$ cd /opt/hfsX.X.XXX # subsititue X.X.XXX with your actual version
$ source houdini_setup
$ houdini

edward
How are you launching Houdini? There might be problems with this if you launch Houdini from the menu. I can't test because I'm on Windows but I've seem this problem before if Houdini thinks that it's being run non-interactively.

as mentioned, I've tried 3 methods. through the menu, through the menu with “run in terminal” activated, and through an actual terminal.

in my .bashrc:
pushd /opt/hfs11.1.67/
source houdini_setup
popd


i've sourced the houdini_setup_bash file directly and tried running houdini in the shell, but I still have the same problem. Not sure what I'm doing wrong…

thanks for your help!

In your shell then, does running “hbatch” work as expected? Type in some commands like ls, cd /obj, etc.

yes, that works, didn't know about that hbatch command:

hbatch Version 11.1.67 (Compiled on 09/27/11)
/ -> ls
obj
out
part
ch
shop
img
vex
/ ->

thanks

I'm not sure what the problem is then. This happens with a default Houdini session without any scene file loaded yet right?

PS. Try starting Houdini using “houdini -foreground” instead.

edward
PS. Try starting Houdini using “houdini -foreground” instead.

genius, that did it! thanks a lot. I noticed that it was automatically backgrounding the process, even w/o an ampersand, didn't know about the -foreground option.

interestingly enough, if I run it as “houdini -foreground &” or ctrl-z and bg the process the textport works great as well. I guess I'll make an alias to use the -foreground by default.

Thanks for your help, much appreciated!

Thanks for trying. We've traced this to what looks like a bad nVidia driver problem where it closes/opens stdin if it thinks the calling process is backgrounded. When you use “&”, I think the shell does it after the OpenGL driver is initialized, thereby avoiding the problem.

We've now fixed this problem for the next daily build.

groovy, can't wait to see H12!

many thanks and keep up the great work