Hello,

I'm using Houdini Apprentice 7.0.192, and while I'm working, in the best case an error message appears (something about a memory segmentation fault, and then telling me that the project was saved in my TEMP folder), but most times it just closes without any warning and no project is saved.

What is the problem? Is it because I'm using Windows (XP)? Does Houdini work better on other OSs? Should I install Linux?

Thanks in advance!

(and excuse my bad english )


PS: Now I'm downloading houdini-7.0.231-linux_rh9.tar.gz. Will it work on Fedora Core 3 ?

my practice show me that you need to work very carefull and gently with Houdini. This work style gives good result. At first time Houdini crushes very often on my computer, now - rarely

I'm using Houdini Apprentice 7.0.192, and while I'm working, in the best case an error message appears (something about a memory segmentation fault, and then telling me that the project was saved in my TEMP folder)

This is a bug. A serious bug. Since Side Effects is very aggressive in fixing bugs and releasing software regularly, make that daily, your first reaction should be to install the latest version of that software and see if the bug is still there. That is if you can duplicate the error. If Houdini still crashes, just create a new thread and describe your bug with the latest build and we'll take it from there.
Houdini is one of those rare Windows Applications that allow you to have several versions live happily side by side so no fear to try the latest. Just disk space. This means you can run whatever version you want from the start menu. Obviously double-clicking on a houdini file in Explore will launch the most recent install of Houdini. I don't double click except when giving demos to Windows users. They tend to be very afraid of any typing what so ever.
I use Cygwin unix tools on Windows and proper shell environments to run Houdini for these and far too many other reasons that would fill pages of text.

but most times it just closes without any warning and no project is saved

This is most times related to graphics. If houdini has a memory fault, it will generate a signal 11. If it just dissapears, I look at the graphcis first. What Graphics card and driver do you have installed? Have you installed the latest graphics drivers?
One thing Microsoft did right in XP is that graphics errors no longer result in blue screens of death. Now the app just dissapears. This unfortunately means that the latest graphics cards can ship with ever more immature drivers. Just to to TomsHardware.com to see his rants about this relatively recent behaviour from the big two graphics card developers.

Now I'm downloading houdini-7.0.231-linux_rh9.tar.gz. Will it work on Fedora Core 3 ?

Yes it will.

I recently installed SuSE 9.3 and Houdini works great with it, no crashes and many things work much better than in Windows!
I've installed Houdini 7.0.231 Apprentice in Windows XP and while I was modelling something, a simple hammer, it just disappeard. I looked for my project in the TEMP folder, thinking that it might do like 7.0.192 , it was there but incomplete . And I must mention that I've worked as clean as possible, no extreme operations , just simple box modelling.

Anyway I'll just stick to Linux! Thanks for your replys!

Oh, one more question, how/where do I put those commands for initializing Houdini (source houdini_setup_bash; sesinetd) to run automatically when I login? (I'm just a beginner )

Thanks!

While I'm no big windows fan, I'll admit to siding with Jeff that any sporadic crashing and things disappearing with Houdini is definitely a “something's wrong” scenerio. Most often it tends to be related to graphics drivers , or the card itself(meaning that Houdini is fussier than most WRT having a fairly decent card). Also, windows having thousands more virii(and software, for that matter, of all levels of professionalism) out there make it more likely the system can become corrupt in certain areas. That said, Houdini release versions, with a good card, latest drivers, and decent memory never crashes on Linux for me.

Assuming you're using bash(the default), put startup commands in the file

.bashrc

in your home directory. This means whenever you start a shell, that will be run. That's great for sourcing the houdini_setup_bash, but no good for sesinetd(which should only be started once per system boot).

First off, make sure in your .bashrc you cd to the $HFS before running - this is specific to the way SESI setup the script - that way you can change versions on the fly without it becoming a big production. “cd'ing” to directories in your startup shell rc isn't the most elegant of methods, and while it's OK, isn't really the way to do it. That particular script is really intended to be run interactively, but you can do it - just try to remember to cd back to $HOME when done for slightly better form.

sesinetd - that's a little trickier - when installing Houdini that should be setup to start automatically every reboot - I haven't done this in so long, however, I'm not sure if they've got this working properly with SUSE yet. SUSE is one of a group of Linux vendors that's trying to spearhead the LSB(Linux Standard Base), a group that's hoping to standardize certain basic things(like system startup scripts) so that applications can say they're “LSB compatible”. It's an amirable effort - it's amazing how different all the distros are with this. However, guess what? Redhat isn't really going along for the ride. their argument is of course that it would break too many things, but they insist on doing things their way.

Politics aside, that may be why sesinetd isn't starting automatically every boot(assuming you installed the license server - you should have seen some sort of failure message if it broke during install). The biggest problem is that SUSE has the startup scripts in /etc/init.d, but the actual links that call them are in /etc/init.d/rc5.d(all the various rcn.d dirs where “n” is runlevel). RH, sticks it's in /etc/rc.d/rcn.d, while the actual scripts are in the same place as SUSE. You'll probably see that the SESI install stuck it's link in there - the only script there. If you're comfortable doing sysadm stuff, you could send that link to the rc5.d directory in linux. Otherwise, the safest approach is to just start it manually until SESI's installer decides to start checking for LSB distros.

Cheers,

J.C.

Thanks! I'll try, maybe it works! , but since there are just about 3 commands, I think I'll do it manully!
Thanks again!