Most appreciated. Was redirected here from the Naiad forum and this works a treat. The problem only occurred after installing Spotify… Had Naiad, Nuke, and Maya installed along side Houdini for ages with no issues, go figure. Thanks!

I recently contacted support with this reply:

Unfortunately, the HQueue help documentation is rolled in with the HQueue server so ironically it isn't available until the server is actually running. We are looking into uploading an HTML version of the help onto our website for reference.

DOH! They did give me this though:
- Make sure that the pre-requisite packages (python2.5, mysql-client, mysql-server, python-mysqldb) are installed.
- Then download Houdini for Linux and run the installer (i.e. houdini.install)
- In the product menu, choose HQueue. I would suggest installing a copy of Houdini as well since HQueue requires hserver to be running in order for it to verify licenses. If hserver is already running on the machine, then you can skip installing Houdini.
- Follow the steps in the installer. When asked for a mysql db account and password, you can try ‘root’ as the user and an empty password. This typically is the default on most Linux distros.
- Once installation is complete, you can view HQueue help documentation at http://localhost:5000/help. [localhost] The docs include information on how configure HQueue and add client machines to the system.
- If localhost:5000 is unavailable, then the server is not running. You can view /opt/hqueue/errors.log to see what the error is.

Once it's up the help documentation is good though.