This has been a bit of a problem in the past. It suddenly disappeared for me for some reason so I've assumed that the problem has gone away.

First things first, make sure that sesinetd is running. As root, just do “rc-status” and see if sesinetd is in the list and is on. If it isn't, then you'll have to start sesinetd (as root, “/etc/init.d/sesinetd start”)

Next thing to do is to try and start up hkey. The first thing to check is whether the license server is pointing at your own machine. In hkey, open up the file menu and select “Change License server” – You might have to change the host to something like “localhost” or your IP Address, or your machine name. Try pressing the “local server” button.

If this doesn't help, you can try to get licenses manually from http://license.sidefx.com/get_nc_license.php [license.sidefx.com] – it's a slow process, but it usually gets the job done. Just follow the instructions on the site. You can enter the licenses into hkey manually in file > enter licenses manually.

Please let me know if this solves your problem (failure or success, any feedback is appreciated). Incidentally, this ebuild is slightly out of date. I'm intending on creating an ebuild for the latest build of apprentice sometime this weekend (eep, school keeps me busy). Stay tuned for updates.

I didn't do the ebuild because it was out of date. I am running 2.6.8-gentoo-r7, KDE 3.3. Through various posts here and on the Gentoo forums, I gathered together a manual install process that works for me so far. I'll update this as needed:

as root:


mkdir /etc/rcX.d
ln -s /etc /etc/rc.d
ln -s /etc/rcX.d /etc/rc1.d
ln -s /etc/rcX.d /etc/rc2.d
ln -s /etc/rcX.d /etc/rc3.d
ln -s /etc/rcX.d /etc/rc4.d
ln -s /etc/rcX.d /etc/rc5.d

tar -zxvf houdini-7.0.192-linux_rh9.tar.gz
cd houdini-7.0.192-linux_rh9
./houdini.install


After the install I was able to run Houdini, however on reboot I couldn't because of License Error: Unable to connect to hserver for license acquisition

This is because the sesinetd script in /etc/init.d/ won't work with Gentoo. So I borrowed a script from the Gentoo forums and placed it in /etc/init.d/


nano -w /etc/init.d/mysesinetd

#!/sbin/runscript

depend() {
after xdm
}

start() {
ebegin “Starting Sesinetd”
/etc/init.d/sesinetd start
eend $? “Sesi died argh…”
}

stop() {
ebegin “Stopping Sesinetd”
/etc/init.d/sesinetd stop
eend $? “Sesi won't die…Send reinforcemnets…sk…”
}


To make the license server startup on boot type:


rc-update add mysesinetd default


And now to start up Houdini type as a regular user, not root:


cd /opt/hfs7.0.192/ (assuming that's where you installed Houdini)
source houdini_setup_bash (I use bash)
houdini


This procedure allowed me to install and run Houdini. I did have a problem that the help browser was broken. To fix this I had to resolve some dependencies (I figured this out from NTmatter2's script):

virtual/x11
virtual/jre
kde-base/kdelibs-3.2
app-shells/tcsh
dev-lang/tcl

So far, so good. Hopefully this will help someone out and maybe the new ebuild too! I suppose if I took the time I could help rewrite the ebuild as needed, but seeing as I'm new to Gentoo I'm just happy I got Houdini installed manually!

Cheers,

Alex

Hi thanks for feedback

I did /etc/init.d/sesinetd start , check it with rc-status -a and sesinetd is started and i have the same problem.( License Error: Unable to connect to hserver for license acquisition)
here is my sesi diagnostic:
Diagnostic Output:
==================
If you are having licensing problems, please save this information and email it
to support@sidefx.com.

License Administrator output:
=============================
Generated on: Thu Oct 14 12:42:01 2004
Local host name: shadow
Local server code: 7da5a100
Local ip address: 6.0.0.0
License server name: shadow
Server ip address: (could not look up server)
License server is running: No
License Administrator version: 7.0.171
Http proxy host: (none)
Can retrieve http://license.sidefx.com/index.php: [license.sidefx.com] Yes

Installed licenses:
LicID Platform Product Ver Avail Expiry
—– ——– ——- — —– ——

sesictrl -i output:
===================
Cannot connect to server shadow (192.192.192.60)- verify that sesinetd is running.



hserver -l output:
==================


licenses file:
==============
* Could not open the licenses file. *


when i tried with my ip(i changed it with hkey and Change License server) :

Diagnostic Output:
==================
If you are having licensing problems, please save this information and email it
to support@sidefx.com.

License Administrator output:
=============================
Generated on: Thu Oct 14 12:40:19 2004
Local host name: shadow
Local server code: 7da5a100
Local ip address: 0.0.0.0
License server name: 81.168.210.137
Server ip address: 81.168.210.137
License server is running: Yes
May read licenses from server: No
License Administrator version: 7.0.171
Http proxy host: (none)
Can retrieve http://license.sidefx.com/index.php: [license.sidefx.com] Yes

Installed licenses:
LicID Platform Product Ver Avail Expiry
—– ——– ——- — —– ——

sesictrl -i output:
===================
Server 81.168.210.137: Access denied for operation



hserver -l output:
==================


licenses file:
==============
* The local machine is not the server machine, so the licenses file
cannot be shown. *


and licenses key wrote into license file - manually(i can't enter it with hkey):

Diagnostic Output:
==================
If you are having licensing problems, please save this information and email it
to support@sidefx.com.

License Administrator output:
=============================
Generated on: Thu Oct 14 12:46:43 2004
Local host name: shadow
Local server code: 7da5a100
Local ip address: 0.0.0.0
License server name: shadow
Server ip address: (could not look up server)
License server is running: No
License Administrator version: 7.0.171
Http proxy host: (none)
Can retrieve http://license.sidefx.com/index.php: [license.sidefx.com] Yes

Installed licenses:
LicID Platform Product Ver Avail Expiry
—– ——– ——- — —– ——

sesictrl -i output:
===================
Cannot connect to server shadow (234.154.12.1)- verify that sesinetd is running.



hserver -l output:
==================


licenses file:
==============
SERVER shadow 7da5a100 05d0796fc23395bb44995a7bd8b7ea3b4e70959e5a20f1
LICENSE Generic Houdini-Master-NonCommercial 7.0 1 16-nov-2004 +.+.+.+ shadow a0a4cd3e V@wcdUTGZB44Br5hBTQHBM+XXNk4p5t@OBTojxcfVqOyZA4R20+OlB3
LICENSE Generic Render-NonCommercial 7.0 1 16-nov-2004 +.+.+.+ shadow 2f501597 T8ea7AaqHtgYwgbzoY4P0xIGcl6qtQOiDNSbUSKn9WsbkwvV4i1NFS3

sorry for my english

thanks for all

It looks like your license admin can't get the IP address because it is not reporting the proper local IP. Are you running a firewall on that system or on your router? It also looks like you are not running the latest Houdini version. I would try a few things:

1) Change the IP address to whatever it is supposed to be on your network and leave it that way and make sure your hostname is set (looks like shadow). It looks like you tried to change your IP and/or your hostname a few times while trying to get this to work. This will only confuse things. Verify that you can access the Internet normally (web, email, etc.) from the computer before re-installing.

2) Download and install the latest Apprentice install.

3) Follow my previous instructions.

Starting over with a fresh install may fix things up for you.

HTH,

Alex

i downloaded latest houdini i did like you write and it's not working(sesinetd is off).Internet is working fine,i don't have firewall on my system.
With windows houdini is working fine.
Maybe i just give up with this problem for now

hi, I solved my problemI just wrote my computer's name into hosts file in /etc and houdini is working and I'm happy now

cheers

Excellent! It's always that last overlooked detail that gets you!

Hey everyone. I was about to post a new topic on this!

I'm typing this from within Houdini, running on Gentoo Linux.
(2.4.26-gentoo-r9 #1 running on an i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1600MHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux)


There were a couple of gotcha's which haven't been mentioned.

First, though, let me say I think Gentoo Linux is brilliant. Some of you will know i've been running Houdini and IRIX for a very long time. I've moved to Gentoo after several other flavours of Linux. This is running on my personal laptop, dual booted with bloody Windows XP. I was running Redhat, but got sick of maintaining it. In the past I've also “done time” with Slackware, Debian, and even Yellow Dog on a mac powerbook! (out of interest). They're all bad (heh heh). VxWorks is a cool OS. :-)

The one thing which caught my interest was “portage” (aka “emerge”, aka “ebuild”). Make sure you understand what Gentoo's “emerge” will do for you before you dismiss it. Basically, emerge is like debian's apt-get,but it does ALL the dependency stuff properly. Ie: if A depends on B which depends on C, emerge will do the deep dependency thang. Very cool. So much more than a plain rpm. It's like IRIX's “inst” or “swmgr” on steroids. {Thanks to Mike Cronin for putting me onto Gentoo…}

The thing i love about Gentoo is you just type "emerge –sync“ and it updates everything over the net for ya. yay!! You can get Gentoo ”Stage 3“ up and running in about 2 hours, and then go back and ”hard core" re-compile everything while you use the system (if you can be bothered to do this). It feels pretty fast out-of-the-box. I downloaded 2 cd's via Windows (the Live CD and the Packages CD). Burnt the cd's using Windows-XP, and then booted and installed Gentoo over the top of my old Redhate.



Anyways. Sorry. I digress. You probably wouldn't be reading this if you weren't already interested…

I downloaded hfs7.0.192 from http://sidefx.vislab.usyd.edu.au/ [sidefx.vislab.usyd.edu.au]

Extracted the tar file and simply ran the install script and let it install where it wanted to go
(ie. into /opt/hfs7.0.192).

Here's my changes:

1. I found (naturally) the “sesinetd” wasn't running at first. This is generally why people were having the license problems. There's a local init script in /etc/init.d/local which you can take advantage of. I think this is the best way to go. The “sesinetd” from SESI gets installed in /etc/init.d so that's good. If you read /etc/init.d/local you'll see you need to edit

/etc/conf.d/local.start

just put a line in there like this:


# /etc/conf.d/local.start:
# $Header: /home/cvsroot/gentoo-src/rc-scripts/etc/conf.d/local.start,v 1.4 2002/11/18 19:39:22 azarah Exp $

# This is a good place to load any misc.
# programs on startup ( 1>&2 )

#
# Start the sesi license daemon
#
/etc/init.d/sesinetd start

and /etc/conf.d/local.stop


# /etc/conf.d/local.stop:
# $Header: /home/cvsroot/gentoo-src/rc-scripts/etc/conf.d/local.stop,v 1.4 2002/11/18 19:39:22 azarah Exp $

# This is a good place to unload any misc.
# programs you started above.
# For example, if you are using OSS and have
# “/usr/local/bin/soundon” above, put
# “/usr/local/bin/soundoff” here.

#
# Stop the sesi license daemon
#
/etc/init.d/sesinetd stop


Then, when you boot the sesinetd license daemon will start. Once it's running, you can
source the houdini environment and run houdini, or hkey, and get an Apprentice License or whatever. This is what i did. I initially ran “houdini” as root, so that i could have the right user-permissions to install the license. (I actually logged-in as root at the Xdm login to avoid the intial DISPLAY variable / xhost perm errors, which i'm yet to fix – i've just got Gentoo KDE installed tonight).


2. Another thing was the initial gentoo installation didn't have /bin/csh !!!??! And so the built-in hbrowser wouldn't start up. In the window where i started houdini I got the error:

Exec failed for: ./hbrowser
X11 Error (3): BadWindow (invalid Window parameter)
X11 Error (3): BadWindow (invalid Window parameter)

the simple (for gentoo) fix was to do this:

# emerge app-shells/csh

very cool. this gets csh off the net and compiles and installs it.
Weird that csh wasn't standard (even though “csh is considered dangerous”).
anyways.. that fixes that, as this post demonstrates.

Actually, in case you're interested, the way i knew to specify “app-shells/csh” was i'd previously run:
# emerge –search csh
Searching…



* app-shells/ccsh
Latest version available: 0.0.4-r2
Latest version installed:
Size of downloaded files: 11 kB
Homepage: http://ccsh.sourceforge.net/ [ccsh.sourceforge.net]
Description: UNIX Shell for people already familiar with the C language
License: GPL-2

* app-shells/csh
Latest version available: 1.29-r3
Latest version installed:
Size of downloaded files: 175 kB
Homepage: http://www.netbsd.org/ [netbsd.org]
Description: Classic UNIX shell with C like syntax
License: BSD

* app-shells/scsh
Latest version available: 0.6.5
Latest version installed:
Size of downloaded files: 4,211 kB
Homepage: http://www.scsh.net/ [scsh.net]
Description: Unix shell embedded in Scheme
License: as-is | BSD | GPL-2

* app-shells/tcsh
Latest version available: 6.12-r3
Latest version installed:
Size of downloaded files: 804 kB
Homepage: http://www.tcsh.org/ [tcsh.org]
Description: Enhanced version of the Berkeley C shell (csh)
License: BSD

* x11-misc/electricsheep
Latest version available: 2.5
Latest version installed:
Size of downloaded files: 604 kB
Homepage: http://electricsheep.org/ [electricsheep.org]
Description: realize the collective dream of sleeping computers from all over the internet
License: GPL-2


I installed tcsh while I was at it.

This gentoo is using the nvidia-kernel ebuild. It was all pretty simple to get going.
The one hiccup I hit was to get Xdm running from boot, which required a
# rc-update add xdm default after changing the /etc/inittab to boot the “default” runlevel. I think I might have missed that part in the install doc's.

The other gotcha was sorted out once I worked out that I was looking to configure /etc/X11/xorg.conf instead of the old XConfig86-4 …. As i've got xorg-x11 installed. duh. In there you uncomment “Load glx” and glx things run muuuch better. ha ha. The installation doc's for gentoo are really good, btw. www.gentoo.org [gentoo.org]

cheers,
ben.

Personally, I wouldn't bother with the original csh at all. Just install tcsh and softlink csh to tcsh.

I'm just wondering if the ebuild idea is continuing now, and I really hope it's been in portage, since I believe gentoo will give houdini some better performance if configured properly.

Q1:
anyone got the lastes gentoo-sources 2.6.14-gentoo-r5, working wiz the latest stable version of houdini? Linux i686 gcc3.4?

Q2:
is the network rendering functionality supported by the non-commercial version of houdini for linux?

thank you!

My apologies, as the ebuild's been rather dead as of late. It was a bit of a side-project with the goal of putting Houdini and some other utilities onto a Gentoo LiveCD, but was killed on account of the lack of documentation for the Catalyst script. If I get any spare time in the near future, I'll try to put together an updated version of the ebuild using Apprentice 8.0 over the upcoming weekend.

As for the Houidini-on-LiveCD (nicknamed Houdinix), if anybody's interested in it, I'll try to pursue it further. I did a proof of concept a while back based off of Morphix, and it worked fairly well. The only problems were the initial loading time of Houdini, and finding a place to store files and rendered image sequences. To work around this, I just dropped all of my files into a CVS repository, and wrote a script to upload files directly to an FTP server when the frame finished rendering. A reasonably-sied USB Memory Stick would be a decent workaround nowadays.

i c, NTmatter2, thank you for trying to help with this issue, it would really benefit users and houdini project if it happens, your concept of Houdinix sounds great too, and as I learn more about gentoo & houdini, I'll see what I can do too.

I would love to see an updated ebuild for Gentoo. (as well as a LiveCD ! )

Sorry for the delay, everyone. The Houdini 8.x ebuild and associated files are now located at http://www.axante.net/download/gentoo/houdini-ebuild.tar.gz [axante.net] Just download and extract into a portage overlay. You're now ready to emerge media-gfx/houdini-apprentice

My recommendation would be to simply grab the entire overlay by anonymous SVN at http://svn.axante.net:8088/svn/overlay/trunk [svn.axante.net] so that you can stay up to date with the glacial changes that are being made. Simply check out into an overlay, and you're set to emerge media-gfx/houdini-apprentice

This ebuild is written from the ground up, so it'll probably have a bunch of new bugs. As I'm not a very advanced houdini user, I can't claim to be able to test everything in depth, so I am counting on all of your feedback to make the ebuild better and identify compatibility problems. The only issues that I am aware of so far are as follows:

- Should probably have a dependancy on a Java Runtime Environment or possibly even the Development Kit. No ideas as to what version Houdini needs, though.
- Presently no support for the 64-bit version of Houdini, as I don't have a 64-bit box to play with
- This is in no way officially supported by SESI.

Have fun with it, everyone! Happy Houdiniing.