I recently built up a new machine. Early in the build, I installed and tested Houdini - it worked fine. Today, it doesn't work - nothing works… hserver, hkey, mantra, houdini. Every gives a pretty quick Segmentation Fault. I've tried build 383 and 474. I'm running Ubuntu 5.10.

The machine has an old Nvidia GeForce FX 5200… but that should make much difference to mantra, should it?

It also has both g++ v 3.3 & 3.4.5 - installed with apt. 3.4.5 is the active version (the one /usr/bin/g++ is aliased to).
kernel 2.6.12-10-686-smp

ideas?

Solved.

I hate to admit it, but I was mistakenly logged into the machine in question when I upgraded my kernel (so I actually upgraded the kernel of the other machine). In doing so, I broke the graphics module, which caused houdini to no longer work. Uninstalling and reinstalling the nvidia kernel module (doing the whole “sh NVIDIA-driver.bin” thing) solved it.

I don't understand why mantra had a problem, but it did.

regardless, if you get immediate seg faults, look at your nvidia kernel module & make sure your graphics are still running properly. ( as a super simple test, assuming you have xscreensaver installed, run “/usr/lib/xscreensaver/pulsar -delay 0 -fps” - you should get something > 200… on the order 2-3000 for current machines/graphics cards)