I can get the Apprentice edition installed just fine, no errors there. Everything comes up correctly and runs smoothly except for the confirmation windows when saving or exiting or things of that nature. They don't display at all. I hear the warning beep, then I see nothing. The window button does show up on my taskbar, but I don't see the window at all. I can minimise the window using the button on the taskbar and I can see the outline as it minimises, but that's the only time it's visible. The only way I can exit Houdini because of this is to bring up xkill and do it that way.

I'm running Redhat 8.0 with Gnome on an AMD k6-2 500 w/ 192MB SDRAM, PNY GeForce 4 MX420, with the most recent nvidia drivers. If you need any more info I'll be more than happy to provide it. Thanks for any help you can throw my way.

There are known problems with the Gnome 2 default window manager - Metacity. No workarounds that I know of except to stop using it. It's kind of useless anyway, since you can't remap some pretty basic key configs like Alt-LMB - which you would normally want to set keyframes(there's other's too).

You can either use KDE, which runs fine, or you can use another window manager under Gnome 2 like Sawfish(both of these you need to explicitly install). Anyway - to stop using Metacity under Gnome 2, they force you to manually edit a text file to run another window manager - I believe it's in $HOME/.gnome or .gnome2 - it's been a while sorry.

Cheers,

J.C.

You know, that's something that should REALLY be in the README file. Thanks for the help. This had been annoying the crap out of me for a while now. I'll see about installing Sawfish since KDE is a load of crap, IMO, and Window Maker just doesn't work right with Houdini. It's nice and fast (oh boy is it fast), but it doesn't change desktops correctly. Weirdness. Thanks again.

Just for the record, I thought I'd post this:

I just got my system up to RedHat 9, and sure enough I ran into the same window troubles, word on the streets is that Metacity is a bad window manager for Houdini. The first thing I did was go to RPMfind.net and grab the package for the Sawfish window manager.
Once I that was installed, I tried editing all manner of config files, pointing everything to Sawfish instead of Metacity, and nothing changed it, no matter what I did, Metacity would always load. Then I found this simple method somewhere:

Open a shell and type:
killall -9 metacity ; sawfish
(metacity should die and sawfish should be launched before metacity has a chance to respawn)

gnome-session-save
(immediately saves your session, this makes your new sawfish session your defaul session?)

That's what worked for me… while I'm at it, I'll re-post another thing I found on the OD.FORCE Linux forums (thanks JohnC!):
Add this environment variable to your .cshrc or .login file, for us c-shell users:
setenv LD_ASSUME_KERNEL 2.4.1


Jason Simmons

Thanks for all the help. The window manager switching is a PITA. The most annoying part is that apparently Redhat at one time had window manager selection in the control panel, but has since removed it. Anyway, Sawfish is up and running and everything works fine. A quick tip. Unless you want to have a shell popping up every time you start X, run gnome-session-save through the command line in the toolbar instead of a shell.