I'm running RH 7.1 with KDE, I installed the apprentice edition and the instalation process went smoothly, but I haven't been able to run it, acording to the documentation at some point i'm supossed tpo be asked about the licensing, anyways, I can succesfully setup the environment and i try running both houdini and hkey but they are both dumping cores, any ideas?

It's a wild guess(especilly since I'm a Windows user) but check if the hserver is running.

May I know what graphics card are you using? Also, which drivers are you using? XFree or from the vendor?

The documentation refers to Windows installation & not Linux so the licensing part is skipped.

Houdini will core due to no licenses found but hkey shouldn't. If hkey still dies on you, it might be due to the graphics card driver.

that's a good point, I have a Gforce 2 GTS and as far as i recall i never downloaded any drivers for the linux side, so I must be runninf the X-free drivers, now, funny thing, when i try to run houdini from a Shell, I get as far as seing the houdini image on the screen, and then it dies, i check the procesess and Hserver keeps runiing, and there's another process which name i don't remember in defunct. so do you think that I should install the vendors drivers?

Yes, you need to download the Linux drivers from Nvidia's web site. The XFree drivers are not as ‘optimized’.

Yep, the splash would come up but the GUI will not start. If you want to get the license first, you can set this environment variable: HOUDINI_OGL_SOFTWARE to 1 ( setenv HOUDINI_OGL_SOFTWARE 1 ) which will force Houdini to use software OpenGL. This is highly not recommended but if you need to start hkey, this can be used as a workaround.

I would recommend installing the drivers & making sure the drivers are working before trying to run hkey. You can also use hkey to check whether the drivers are working.

I would also recommend setting your Runlevel to 3 due to the graphics drivers installation. Please read the ‘Readme’ file that comes with the driver thoroughly to ensure a smooth & relatively painless installation.

Once you have the drivers installed, you should be able to run hkey to get your license to run Houdini.

Woohoo!

If installing new drivers doesn't work, you may also need to upgrade libGLU.so.1. Some mesa versions of libGLU have buggy tesselation code. You'll find a copy of a working libGLU.so.1 in the Linux7 directory on the CD that you can copy to /usr/lib.

Also note that HOUDINI_OGL_SOFTWARE is Windows-only.