Hi,

just a note for those of you running Houdini 5.0 on WinXP
I just noticed that I only had 2 of the 3 useful Houdini directories
listed in my PATH environment. I had:

C:\Houdini5.0.94\gnu\bin
C:\Houdini5.0.94\gnu\bin\other

but I was missing

C:\Houdini5.0.94\bin

You may have your houdini installed in another place, like C:\Program Files\Houdini…. But you should be able to work out the difference!

To add the extra dir (which allows you to use hscript and so on) you should click on the start menu, then right click on My computer, and select properties, then click on Advanced in the pop-up, and then Enviroment variables button. scroll down in the System Variables till you see path, and double click on that. At the end you can add the extra directory, if it's missing. Note that each directory listed in that string is separated by a semi-colon ‘;’ so you will probably need to type a ‘;’ before you enter the missing directory.

This might have been fixed for H5.5 - and/or it might just be my
funny WinXP configuration, so caveat emptor!

cheers,
ben.

Hi Ben,

On Windows, very little of the environment variables are disturbed. Houdini can run from the Start Menu right off the bat as installed.

In H5.5, no environment variables are modified at all since the GNU utilities are no longer included. Users are recommended to install the Cygwin utilities from http://www.cygwin.com [cygwin.com] if they want Unix functionality on Windows. In fact, the old “csh” link in the Start Menu items has been replaced with something called “Command Line Utilities”. This starts up a cmd shell window with the environment (HFS, HH, etc) initialized so that any of the Houdini command line utilities can be used without sourcing houdini_setup.

If you still prefer to use (t)csh from a stock install of Houdini, you still can. You first run the “Command Line Utilities” item from the Start Menu and then type “csh”. Once you're inside csh, you can get a useable shell without the cygwin utilties, by using the windows specific tcsh command “sourcerc”.

Are the GNU utilities being replaced with something else?

The Cygwin environment is an outgrowth of those windows GNU utilities that were included on the installation CDs. The GNU utility package was renamed at some point to Cygwin by the owner company Cygnus, which was then later bought by Red Hat.

Anyhow, upgrading to the latest Cygwin environment is a good move if you want a Unix environment on Windows. The latest cygwin even has an Xserver you can use and reports of running the Black Box window manager on it all within Windows.

almost calls for sesi to add a how-to use cygwin in the user guides.

-k