Have any of you brave souls succeeded in getting Houdini 18.5 to run in Windows Subsystem for Linux yet?

Graphics support for Linux apps is now GPU-enabled and without a Windows-side Xserver and display, and H18.5.696 --almost-- works. The reason for spelunking this rabbit hole is that I wanted a way to side-by-side test Windows vs Linux platform differences in geo output. Plus, I like Linux, but a lot of our tooling is Windows only.

Anyway, the license manager runs, as does hserver. I'm struggling a lot with VPN connections and remote license servers though. I can start hserver in a bash shell, but hkey reports it as not running. Running Houdini for the first time (I reinstalled it a lot) gets me to the license type dialog, but no licenses (including apprentice) are installed.

Anyway, just wondering if anyone got Houdini to the 'Hello World' stage.

Cheers!

This sounds very interesting for those of us who are tied to a win workstation infrastructure.

Please do keep us updated.

Are you trying to get win32 Houdini to run from the WSL shell, or somehow start the linux build? I've gotten the windows version to run by sourcing houdini_setup in the wsl shell and running houdini.exe, but it just launches the windows verison which lacks shell direction so isn't that useful. You can use it to script houdini commands like hbatch and icp and such though.

@jsmack I'm trying to get the x86-64 Linux build to run from the WSL Ubuntu bash shell. What's fun is that hkey runs as a graphical application, with no Windows Xserver like VcXsrv running. Obvs the best way to run Houdini on Linux is to run it on a Linux workstation. I'm constrained by the fact that I have one workstation and a finite amount of research budget (USD$0.00, according to the ledger)

A couple of learnings so far:

• Only CUDA and DirectML GPU compute are supported in WSL on Nvidia cards, and there's no OCL CPU support in the kernel for my AMD Ryzen9 CPU. Houdini would crash on launch until I was able to disable OpenCL. I'm not at my workstation right now, but I had to set a HOUDINI_OCL env variable, I just don't remember which one.
  
• I haven't figured out how to connect to a license server running on a remote machine. I can ping it, but I can't get a license from it.
  
• Apprentice licenses can't be used either. I suspect it's because the machine allowed by the local, noncommercial license is the Windows machine and not the "machine" WSL is.
  
• WSL and WSL networking are still a bit opaque to me in terms of how they function on a basic level, in that I don't know if a hserver process started and managed in one bash shell can be counted on to handle network or local licenses for a Houdini or hbatch process running in another,. I also don't know if the hserver instance running on Windows conflicts with one launched from the WSL bash shell, or if the WSL hserver instance is somehow nerfed from sensitive inter-process communication by WSL, or disqualified from use at all in WSL by SideFX.
  

Also, even with GPU support in WSL, I expect OpenGL and Qt issues to surface. WSL is still not quite real Linux.