JColdrick
$HIP is positively useless, only good for demos. Where you started up Houdini is about as important as what colour shirt you're wearing that day. Discard, ignore. Far far too error-prone.

Errr… Are you saying its OK to not wear a shirt on Monday?

Seriously though, when working on shots I always use the shell to start Houdini. I also have a Houdini Icon on my KDE bar at the bottom that launches Houdini in my “scratch” area. Quite often while working on a shot I'll click my little icon to load up an empty session so I can test something/confirm something. (Plus it rocks when you need to look busy when one of the overlords comes in.)

Wolfwood
Errr… Are you saying its OK to not wear a shirt on Monday?

If outside TO is subzero.
Quick, JC, make sure you have a camera ready for that Kodak moment!!

(Plus it rocks when you need to look busy when one of the overlords comes in.)

Erm, nice in theory, but alas those E.V.E. Online screens you have up on your laptop tends to give away the goat.

J.“Faster than Alt-tab”C.

Shirt? Ewwww….

Hey Wolfwood,

if ya need a shirt - here's one!

I'll think this suits Wolfwood better Ben:

Pagefan
Dries: i do prefer using the teminal these days because houdini does print out messages that could be usefull debugging scripts etc. etc.

You're right, you should be able to redirect those. For mantra output, I render the log to a file and read it with logviewer. I can nicely see what's going on for renders. Lacking other info though… If anyone knows how to redirect everything, I would like to hear about it.

Pagefan
In Suse you can add your own applications via the menumaker in the configuration manager. It's all gui based so no need to worry about where to put icons and scripts etc.

That's the same in Ubuntu with Alacarte. But that program puts everything in $HOME/.local for you. (Just like in Suse, me thinks.) I like to install .dekstop files in /usr/local/share/applications. That directory is on a share and so everyone that uses those programs, have the icon and everything installed. Install once, use everywhere. Alacarte should mature into a tool that let's you decide System Wide or User Wide.


For your interest, the order defined by freedesktop.org is: /usr/share;/usr/local/share;$HOME/.local

/usr/share is for software included with your distro, /usr/local/share is for non-distro software. So globally install non-distro software would bring you to /usr/local/share

I have to admit it took me a while to figure this out. But as said before, there is a guideline that pins all this. Distro's should take care just a little bit more. Most of them are only off by a few minor things. I got the feeling they are finally moving in the right direction.

JC did some reading on all the houdini paths you can set and, well, it could be a fulltime job D! I can imagine the frustration with the PathPolice. Still could imagine you had a startup script where you specify the JOB and then the script set some extra envars, something in the way like

#! /bin/bash
JOB_ROOT=“/mnt/project/houdini/jobs”
source $JOB_ROOT/${1}/.profile
export JOB=${1}
hescape ${2}

The .profile can hold valuable data like paths to audacious/xmms playlists or trigger commands like shutdown -h +540

Dries thanks for the additional info. E17 is still a bit experimental and, surprise, surprise, still has some little annoyances. One of them is the way it builds it's menu. In my former WM (fluxbox) the menu was text based (aka I had to made it in vim).

I think the oss projects are getting user friendlier by the day. Seems there is a lot of standardization going on (Portland, wider acceptance of hal/dbus, xdg etc). Still it's the distro maintainers who can screw up big time. They are responsible for the “Linux”-feel. Lot of work to be done there

KeithBallinger
Here's how I solved two problems installing Houdini Apprentice on ubuntu 6.10.

The problem with:
houdini.install: 765: let: not found
can be fixed by editing houdini.install. The very first line:
#!/bin/sh
should be changed to:
#!/bin/bash

It looks like ubuntu 6.10 has /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash which does not support the “let” builtin command. /bin/bash does support “let”.

The other problem can be fixed by editing sesinetd.install. The line:
gunzip -c $HERE/houdini.tar.gz | tar xf - “houdini/sbin/sesi*”
needs “–wildcards” added to the tar. It should look like this:
gunzip -c $HERE/houdini.tar.gz | tar xf - –wildcards “houdini/sbin/sesi*”

Those two changes should get houdini installed.

I continue to have trouble getting a license.

This work around works on Ubuntu Studio 7.04. The rest is following directions and pretty basic. One problem I had though was the license. It gave an error initially, but exited out and ran Houdini again. Came right up.

one happy bump.
I just changed houdini.install and sesinetd.install as suggested, and everything worked as charm… I even think that ati is working better then under the windows :shock:

ubuntu 7.04
houdini 8.2.101

JDM71

KeithBallinger
Here's how I solved two problems installing Houdini Apprentice on ubuntu 6.10.

The problem with:
houdini.install: 765: let: not found
can be fixed by editing houdini.install. The very first line:
#!/bin/sh
should be changed to:
#!/bin/bash

It looks like ubuntu 6.10 has /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash which does not support the “let” builtin command. /bin/bash does support “let”.

The other problem can be fixed by editing sesinetd.install. The line:
gunzip -c $HERE/houdini.tar.gz | tar xf - “houdini/sbin/sesi*”
needs “–wildcards” added to the tar. It should look like this:
gunzip -c $HERE/houdini.tar.gz | tar xf - –wildcards “houdini/sbin/sesi*”

Those two changes should get houdini installed.

I continue to have trouble getting a license.

Thank you!

Xubuntu
Houdini NC 8.2.13