I recently installed Houdini under Ubuntu, but I can hardly get it to work. Every time I start the program; the screen goes blank, forcing a restart. After checking my system log, I found the following error message:
Jan 2 20:27:40 LENOVO-03 kernel: *ERROR* i915_wait_irq: EBUSY – rec: 464 emitted: 1182
Jan 2 20:27:41 LENOVO-03 gdm: WARNING: gdm_slave_xioerror_handler: Fatal X error - Restarting :0

It looks like your Intel card (or its driver) doesn't support something that Houdini is doing. What version of Ubuntu are you using?

It's v. 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon). I'll look into which card came with my computer and try to get other drivers for it.

Can you try just one thing for me, and turn off the fancy screen effects that ship with Ubuntu? From memory, it's in the System Preferences menu somewhere, maybe in the Window preferences. Then try running Houdini.

I found the Visual Effects tab under Appearance, but the effects were already turned off.

I'm afraid that, in that case, there's not much we can do. Your graphics driver is crashing when Houdini runs, and we don't really support Intel graphics cards to begin with, either.

Sorry!

I tried this too; got a system halt as soon as Houdini popped up. I must find the Compiz stuff and disable it, I suppose?