mac pro + linux = houdini OR madness?

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ok, it seems that at least one person has managed to get houdini running well on a intel mac - love to hear any followups or if any one else has managed to repeat this.

so, forgive me if this next question seems perverse but has anyone managed to install linux in a intel mac and run houdini on it?

why? well, the new mac hardware looks very well designed (ie, stylish, functional & cool & quiet), competitively priced and potentially gives you the best of all worlds. especially for a home machine. ie, os x, win xp (for the odd game & photoshop) and linux (for doing some real work).

currently, i'm looking to buy either a nice quiet core duo 2 PC but now think why not just get a mac pro - or is this just crazy talk? keen to hear any thoughts or experiences from anyone out there.

regards,

paul
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Hi Paul -
I got Houdini up and running on my iMac in Windows via Bootcamp. It did require a little tweaking to get everything to run smoothly (manually install some graphics drivers… but it wasn't too bad - although, I bet if you had an Nvidia card as opposed to my ATI things might go a bit smoother…).

I still haven't tried installing Linux, because Parallels doesn't have video drivers working (yet) - so Houdini would be worthless there, and I heard that Bootcamp + Linux is a little bit difficult to set up, and since I'm not the most Linux savvy person I've never been too motivated to try that. But I have heard that it is possible.

I tell you what, if you find a site that has rather simple instructions to install Linux I'll give it a whirl on my mac one free evening.

Oh and yes, having a Mac + Windows for gaming/Houdini rocks.
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Hey,

Which driver did you end up going with?

I tried re-installing the ati x1600 driver, however I keep running into some INF error and the install crashes. I tried doing it manually, but here I found that the latest driver was already installed?

At the moment, houdini will run without crashes when OGL is turned off, however with it turn on, just opening a textport causes it to crash.

Any help would be great!

Thanks,
Phillip

PS Has anybody tried the new Imac 24 inch? it's got an nvidia card in it…
Thanks again,
Phillip
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