Hi All ,
As I have just built a new machine without the vista.I have been looking at running a linux 64 bit OS. Thinking great it cannot be that tough. I seem to of walked into a minefield. Just trying to get something that works with the graphics card driver seems to be painful , let alone the immense difficulty of trying to get it installed.
I have tried Unbuntu , installed it just fine but for the life of me I cannot get the (Nivia g8600 gt) force ware driver to install ! .. So I have given up on that !
So to my question can anyone recommend a 64 bit linux OS combo that I can actually use with a Asus P5N32-E SLI and a nvidia 8600gt graphics card and houdini 9.

regards

Rob

did you try Ubuntu's restricted modules installer? should be a couple of clicks and a reboot for it to work… or maybe it just doesnt work with the 8000 series, mine is 7800GTX.

Yes, I wouldn't give up on Ubuntu just yet.
Now, I'm on 7.04 32 bit and my laptop has a hand crank on the side, but other than that I've had no trouble with nvidia.

Perhaps look at these instructions,
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=514161 [ubuntuforums.org]

I'm on ubuntu .. with ATI .. latest drivers are really more stable.. and I cant imagine a more efficent combination for my laptop now.. ubuntu Houdini .. and the rest…

works 100% .. dont give up.

i know there was some “issues” with the nvidia 8xxx cards and linux. ie, it may not be a houdini thing - more of a nvidia issue. i'd check out the nvidia forums too. good luck - and do let us know if you find what was up…

Although the explanation in the link might be a bit daunting it should work. Make sure your xorg.conf is correct, check permissions in /dev and just check you are part of the video group. If you don't succeed in Ubuntu (which should be reasonably hard…) you can try Opensuse 10.2.

There is this nice quote from some little green dude with pointy ears from a galaxy far, far away and then some “Do or do not, there is no try”. So just install the thing and enjoy Ubuntu!

Try Envy. When I played with Ubuntu some months ago I also had problems with my nvidia card and I had the drivers installed in an instant with Envy.
http://albertomilone.com/nvidia_scripts1.html [albertomilone.com]

Dragos

Thanks for the info, looks like I will have to try again with Unbuntu and some extra tools !
The weekend is D day !

Rob

I also recommend envy.I got mine up and running in a couple of minutes.
http://albertomilone.com/nvidia_scripts1.html [albertomilone.com]

Update …

Well the good news ladies and gents is I got Unbuntu installed and I ven got my nvidia drivers installed ! with envy.
Houdini on the other hand has been a different story. The install went went well but I am having some difficulties with actually getting houdini to fire up.

I followed this basic tutorial http://www.cgarena.com/freestuff/tutorials/misc/ubuntu/index2.html [cgarena.com] as a start point. It has somewhat become dated with the new release of H9 but it did help to some degree.
The biggest issue I am having is with using the terminal to actually fire up houdini .Using the terminal I cannot even navigate to the houdini_setup_bash file. Houdini installed to
opt/hfs9.0.740 and by default my terminal has me in home/robert . If I create a new folder I can navige to it using cd newfolder , but as soon as I want to get into anything under the file system I get a no such directory or file error. Needless to say I'm confused baffled and fustrated !. So if someone could explain where im going wrong I'd be dam greatfull.

rob

I think you can simply say
cd /opt/hfs9.0.740 (the first slash is important).
The problem you have now is knowing Linux & Linux shell basics. There are a lot of tuts on the web, for example:
http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Teaching/Unix/ [ee.surrey.ac.uk]
http://www.tutorial5.com/content/view/42/1/ [tutorial5.com]

Dragos

Great stuff …. never realised that / was required.

R

If you got a dime to spare, buy yourself a book called “Running Linux” from O'Reilly. It is a nice synopsis/overview/“tutorial” of running Linux )

Ive got Houdini working ! With a quick launch script !. If I get time a quick tut may be in order !

Thanks all

R

While a quick launch button is useful, the value of launching houdini from a shell should not be overlooked.
The important point about a shell launch is that you can go to the directory where you wish to save your hip files (to use the simplest example) and launch from that directory. Your save path is then pre-set.

Handy to know ,

On installation of Unbuntu , Fire up the Synaptic package manager and search for NTFS
Install the ntfs 3g package and anything else that is related to a NTFS system ! Then under system tools you will find the NTFS config tool. use it to write and read to NFS drives



rob