I've been developing a Linux LiveCD based off of Morphix [morphix.org] that carries Houdini Apprentice with the general goal of being able to use it in my university's computer labs without having to install anything. So far, it seems to be working quite well, aside from needing sesinetd to run at startup, some icons in the menu bar, a bit of UI polish, testing on non-nVidia video cards, and some kind of legal disclaimer stating that Houdini belongs to SideFX…

At the moment, I'm not distributing it or anything (solely personal non-commercial use), but I'm curious as to whether SideFX has any issues with passing the CD along to a few friends here and there.

Also, would anybody else in the Houdini community be interested in this? It's quite handy as a “model & animate anywhere” tool, or for expanding your render farm temporarily*. Concievably, it is quite simple to modify the CD to point to a different license server, so that you could run houdini in non-apprentice mode.


*There is no NTFS write support, but if you are rendering, it's fairly trivial to use frame scripts to FTP your work to an FTP server.

That's pretty damned kewl. Hopefully SESI responds with an OK - in fact they should probably be distributing it themselves since live CDs are so great since you can fiddle with software without impacting your current config in any way…

Cheers,

J.C.

i believe each person you give the cd to would be required to actually go to SESI's site and register as an apprentice user but aside from that it sounds cool.