Who Uses Maya for linux?

[meloncully]

glad to see there is some interest in it.

thanks for voting.!

[Randuin]

maya for linux user here :) it's great

[meloncully]

yay. glad to see somebody uses it and TALKS about it ;p


i must say, it is about 10x faster than the windows version.


its also not really taht much different except the fact that some plugins wont work with it.

[meloncully]

yay let the votes keep on coming!

[Peter Reynolds]

What versions of linux are people using? Why?

[meloncully]

I perosnally am using RedHat linux 9.


mostly because its one of the easier to get started on (converted to linux only about a month ago) and i like it alot. its got lots of tools but not too many. like SuSe or Mandrake. i personally dont like those. and i havent got to mess with Debian, Slack and i dont ever want to try and install gentoo. gentoo == devil.


^_^ and i think RedHat has a large userbase with lots of help around.

[Randuin]

Gentoo Linux with fluxbox WM, flexibility, customizablitiy, speed (because i compile everything) And easy to use (emerge)

[ngrava]

Are there any good 3D distributions?

-=GB=-

[NueFoX]

I use both on Linux and XP. Same configurations..but on Linux Maya runs faster and more solid !

[meloncully]

feel free to ask any questions.


i will be here to help. ;p

[esse]

I was wondering if Maya5.0 runs well on Redhat 9. On the Alias site they mention that it is qualified with RedHat™ Linux® 7.3 or 8.0. http://www.alias.com/eng/products-services/maya/system_requirements.shtml

About the speed: I heard that for rendering it is sometimes up to 25 % faster than Windows on the same hardware.

BTW: Does the Linux version have MentalRay?

[Elliotjnewman]

Yeah - Maya on Linux is Bad as!

Ell

[Randuin]

Originally posted by esse
I was wondering if Maya5.0 runs well on Redhat 9. On the Alias site they mention that it is qualified with RedHat™ Linux® 7.3 or 8.0. http://www.alias.com/eng/products-services/maya/system_requirements.shtml

About the speed: I heard that for rendering it is sometimes up to 25 % faster than Windows on the same hardware.

BTW: Does the Linux version have MentalRay?

With slight tweaking (This applies to almost ANY distribution except Redhat 7.3 and 8) You can get Maya working no problem.

And yes, Mental Ray is available :0

[esse]

Cool to see that MR is available!
Can you elaborate a bit on the tweaking part? (some hints and indications would be much apreciated!)

[DiGiman]

Yes...
I would like to know more about the tweaking as well.

[meloncully]

for the tweaking, all you need todo, is everytime you reboot, just go into console, and type "LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.1" w/o the quotes. and then you can run maya, this only needs to be done 1 time until you reboot.


however, i just made a really rough/cheesy script, that does that and runs maya.


lol. all the script is is this:

#!/bin/sh

LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.1

maya



and yes, MR does come with the maya5 for linux version.

[Mazer]

I'm using it on linux too, it works fine:thumbsup:

The only thing bugin me is my graphire tablet, I can't make it work with Maya ( no stylus options at all in maya) and it's very bugy with gimp:hmm:
Any tips? I'm using Redhat 9 and the latest linux wacom drivers, maybe its my Xf86 config?Those tuts are a bit hard to folow....

[trigger_happy]

hey everyone, i resently installed maya5 on redhat 8. but i came across a few things annoying. holding down the ALT key and LMB clicking move the window around instead of rotating the pesp view. ALT+MMB resizes the window and ALT+RMB brings up a menu [i think i got that the right way around] is there a way to fix this?
also i found that having an empty scene open kept my cpu between 99 and 101% usage! and also took up over 900mb of ram. do i have a problem or is it spose to do this?
:hmm:

-trig

[Randuin]

Trigger, About your ALT mouse button I would advise you to read your Maya manuals :) Everything should be in there. About the ram/CPU usage I would have no idea... Sorry!

PS: Your Alt mouse button's fix is different from every WM that you use, which would you happen to favor?

[meloncully]

trigger: if you use gnome, you probably will have a hard time fixing that prob unless you update your gnome to version 2.x so that you can change so taht alt+MB doesnt do any of those. you can get around that by using shift+alt+mousebutton.

for kde, just dig around until you find it in the preferences. not hard to find.

and i dont know why its using 101% CPU ;p but, i dunno about that problem.




Mazer: odd, that with the wacom drivers its still buggy. maybe there are some plugins or whatnot that can help you out better on the web or something :/

[1000101]

On redhat 7.3; theres an option in gnome to disable the alt-mouse button hotkey.
in 8 your SOL unless you replace metacity with a more recent version. (not sure if they updated the rpm's for metacity on 8)

In 9; just do as previously mentioned with LD_ASSUME_KERNEL (I patched mine into /usr/aw/maya/bin/maya) and change the preferences.

[Randuin]

and for fluxbox (my favoring WM) you can go into their download page and download the alt button patch :)

[meloncully]

if you are using RH9, in gnome i think the place to edit your alt+ keys is in the window behavior? somewhere like that. i think i changed mine to the windows key

[trigger_happy]

thanks guys, im using gnome atm, havnt tryed out kde much. ill have to have a play.
with the cpu load thing, im starting to think maya's just wanting to hog it with empty cycles, just like afterEffects :shame:
but it doesnt make multi tasking very elegant
-trig

[FreeQ]

IMO, Gnome is faster and reliable than KDE for aliasMaya...

But Fluxbox is G.O.D. ;-]

[Doogie]

I dunno how I missed this thread! :annoyed:

Meloncully: I dunno if you caught it earlier (someone mentioned it above), you can edit that line in to your maya startup script /usr/aw/maya/bin/maya (it's acutally a text file). Insert it after the like that saysswitch ("$OSname") statement, so it looks like this:
switch ("$OSname")
case Linux:
set lib = lib
set lsFlags = '-l'
setenv LD_ASSUME_KERNEL 2.4.1
breaksw

Now you don't have to remember anything! As for the MMB prob. In RH9 it's on your RH menu > Preferences > Windows. It's a setting for your window manager (Sawfish I believe, not with Gnome). Just look for "window/behaviour" or similar for the option in most packages.

To answer an earlier question, I believe the only thing missing is the Vector renderer in Maya5 (unless I]m just missing something).

Im a big fan of Maya for Linux. I haven't taken on Gimp, but Crossover Office gets Photoshop working without a hitch. Personally, I usually use a Motif Window Manager when using Maya. It looks a lot like Irix, but it keeps things small, quick and simple. I love just dropping to console for a command line render. I heard network rendering is easy, but it's just too easy for me to telnet to the next box and start a render.

Anyone else have opinions of Maya for Linux?

[Mazer]

Ok, i've managed to get my wacom working perfectly in gimp and even in Photoshop runing trougth crossover ofice:) .
The bad news is that i try and try and still cant get pressure sensitivity to work in Maya.... I managed to make the stylus options accessible by changing the name of the imput devices in my Xf86 to wacom, but still no pressure sensitivity.... I'm getting very annoyed:annoyed:

Can someone help me please:scream: ! Am I the only person in the world using Maya Linux and a Wacom at the same time?

[meloncully]

lol im glad you got it working finally.

but it would seem you are the only one in the world. or maybe there are more..just too lazy to tell you

;)

[Mazer]

Yep, they'r lazy:) , I've been searching the web like crasy and I can't find anithing close to helpful.....

On the other hand if someone is having trouble with a graphire 2 setup, I can explain how I finaly
got it to work on the other apps.

[meloncully]

yay!

today, i got Maya5 sucessfully installed on Gentoo linux ^_^


so now, it should be even faster than on RH


:D

[Doogie]

Did you have to do anything special? Because I'm thinking about switching distros (from RH9 to either LFS or Gentoo)

[meloncully]

Doogie, the only thing special i needed todo was install the RPM system onto gentoo, and so far on gentoo, maya was the only thing i needed RPM's for.


and i would switch to gentoo if i were you. the speed improvements are amazing. so much faster than RH.

and you install what you want. there isnt anything extra that comes with it. you control everything that goes on :D

[Peter Reynolds]

Originally posted by meloncully

and you install what you want. there isnt anything extra that comes with it. you control everything that goes on :D

At last, the solution to BLOATWARE*





*BLOATWARE proudly brought to you by a team of marketing tossers...

[Mazer]

Yes gentoo sounds very nice, its a shame the you need a very fast conection to install-it though:hmm:

By the way meloncully whas it so hard to install as some people say? I believe there are diferent
stages you can chose from?

[1000101]

just remember to emerge lib-compat and you'll be set.

[meloncully]

Mazer: follow the installation instructions on the gentoo website, and its a peice of cake. and no you dont really need a high speed connection to install it, well once you download the image, you have the different stages already on the cd if you get the iso for your cpu. but, when it comes to installing new packages, it would be really nice to have a high speed connection, as it usually downloads the latest tarball and compiles it. so in that aspect yeah.

make sure you have the install docs on hand, and you will be set. ;)

if anything i said up there..^... sounds fuzzy, pm me or something an di will try to clarify.

about the stages:

you can start from 3 stages:
1. bootstrap and all these other completely customisable things, and takes about 6 hrs i think to do the bootstrap.

2: already bootstrapped for you, and u just need to compile the kernel and other miscellaneous things.

3: i think everything is all compiled for you. just install and update your configs (not sure, never done stage 3) and install X and Gnome (or KDE, but gnome is far better )

and for more info

www.gentoo.org

:D



EDIT: im glad to see that there is after all, an interest in using maya for the *nix systems.


PS: you wouldnt believe the speed gains i got just from switching to gentoo from redhat. its outrageous how much faster gentoo is, since its all compiled for my cpu-arch (athlon xp). if you thought maya on redhat smoke windows, wait to you try it on gentoo ;)

[Mazer]

Cool, that sounds interesting:) One thing I didn't quite hunderstand from theyr website is if wen you buy the cds you can do the full install of the basic sistem (in my case it would be the kernel etc, WindowMaker and Kde, compiling from source without having to download anithing from the net ( or at least the downloads wouldn't take more tahn 1 or 2 hours from a dial up)?
From what i've read it seems like the 2 cd pack have gnome and Kde but precompiled.

[Doogie]

That's problem I've found with staying updated in linux. It's insane for people who dont have broadband (mostly during an install). Every few days a new package comes out.... like the Kernel is 5mb of compressed source.

My suggestion is commit to a distro/version, like RH7.2 or something.. maybe update selected packages as needed.

[MunCHeR]

guys has anyone used Maya with Slackware 9.0? I will be getting redhat 9 and slack 9 in the next few days, thought i might give slack a try with fluxbox, dont really like gnome but it is a lot faster than KDE any suggestions, I'm no linux guru btw, had trouble with my dual optical logitech mouse, even after a kernel recompile.

Cheers MunCHeR:beer:

[lurifrax]

hmm, my maya doesn't work weel at all.. i can start it, but when im in, I cant open och save files, not open the hypershade etc. This must be gentoo, cuase it works fine on RH..

[1000101]

did you install maya's dependencies and pre-requisites?
also
do you have your video card drivers installed and are using the correct GLX libraries?


like the Kernel is 5mb of compressed source.

heheh I remember these days. Now its closer to 30mb of compressed source..
Never-the-less I understand your pain.

[swag]

how much faster is that gentoo compared to a RH9.0?

and is it true 25% faster rendering than windows?
what is with the opengl performance is it faster too?

[meloncully]

swag:


gentoo is about at least, 20-30% faster IMHO.

everything is so much more responsive. its because when you install gentoo. what you have compiled up to getting gnome installed, is all there is. no extra bloatware and whatnot like in RH. you only compile what you want. and compiling in gentoo is much faster also. :p

OpenGL performance is MUCH better, i did a test a while ago with an i think, 300k poly model just doing things with it, and it was kinda chuggin and goin a little slow in win. switched over to linux, and not a slow down in sight :D


ihavent done enough rendering to know the difference.

[Mazer]

swag: From my experience, it certainly behaves faster but I didn't do any benchmarks...
All you have to make sure is that you have unstaled all the drivers, people tend to froget to install and configure the drivers because when you install linux it gives you a default setup that works but it's far from optimised (no openGl etc..)
So install everithing before trying any game or app.
I can promisse you some things thoug:

-No more virus making your life miserable everiday.
-No more service packs downloads to fix some new found security breatch.
-No more constant reboots everytime you install a program or driver.
-No more rebooting everitime an app freezes.
-Many choices for windows managers (you can even use one just like SGI's , how is that for ambience ;-) )
-Emacs for all you MelScripting or programing needs
-Gimp and Cinepaint for most people 2d needs
-If you insist Photoshop 7 running with crossover office .There are also rumors about Disney and twoo more unnamed studios, working on a Gpl port( the patch of course not photoshop itself ) using wine to run photoshop on Linux.
-Most Netscape plugs are now available for linux but if you nee more just use croossover plugin.

and also:

-Some very long nights trying to figure out how to make this or that work (like my wacom)
-You'l find yourself doing stupid things like spending hours trying to configure Warcraft 3
with wine, wen you could just reboot on yourMe partition :-)
-A groing felling of superiority towards those "others " who don't know what Fstab or Xf86config are :cool:
-A groing question on your mind... Why can't the rest of the world find the light?

Seriouly, its more about the Os itself than Maya, since it may be faster but not that mutch.It seems more stable on my sistem thought.

[NueFoX]

I'm using pretty much Maya on both operating systems. It works faster with Linux :) It's more stable.

And Gentoo is not faster then Redhat. They all use the same Linux kernel. It is the software and drivers coming with redhat which is slowing redhat. Gentoo is a minimalistic Linux distro :)

And, installing OpenGL libraries might give some hard time to newbies...

And you can't say this distro better then this or this...every distro. based on same kernel..same structure...like apples..red one..green one...yellow one...
i like the green one(slackware)

:beer:

[swag]

thanks meloncully Mazer and NueFoX thats
is very interesting and i hate windows memory management and hope this is the
answer to the problems with maya

[MunCHeR]

does maya 5 work on redhat 9? i get a segmentation fault error, an apparent fix is to copy libgcc_s.so.1 that is in maya5.0\lib\ dir and replace this one with the one in \lib\ of your distribution ! , i tried this and it didnt work any ideas?

Cheers MunCH

[Doogie]

I cant remember if that was the error I got, but when I installed RH9 all i had to do was this (http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&postid=811878#post811878)

[MunCHeR]

thanks doogie, I actually did alter my maya env file, did you get maya running in RH9 ? I think only RH 7.2-8 are supported by alias

Cheers MunCHeR

[Doogie]

yeah, it's running fine for me. Hmm, it's been awhile while since I installed it.. I do remember issues w/ gcc... there is some way to have it run legacy. I think I found the answer in the highend3d forums.

Ill check in to it if I find some time, hopefully this'll help you find an answer though.

[Mazer]

case Linux:
set lib = lib
set lsFlags = '-l'
setenv LD_ASSUME_KERNEL 2.4.1
breaksw

Put this "setenv LD_ASSUME_KERNEL 2.4.1"on your /usr/aw/maya/bin/maya and fcheck files,

[MunCHeR]

Thanks mazer, i did actually read the thread before posting, and unthe info you mentioned just doesnt work for me.

Cheers MunCH

[MunCHeR]

Could anyone elaborate on the alt key issue(I'm using RH 9.0 and Gnome) i changed the default key for alt but the viewport still doesnt do what it should is there another way besides using shift+alt for viewport manipulation?

Kind regards :wavey:

MunCH

[anoe_nomus]

b 4 u start maya, (assuming u r looged in as root)
in a shell type "setenv LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.1"
then start maya.
or u can cd to /usr/aw/maya/bin/maya and open with a text editor and type: setenv LD_ASSUME_KERNEL 2.4.1 in the switch (OS name) operation statement
then save file.
as for the alt key thing if u use gnome u can just go in the windows prefs and selct the "Super" key to move a window, this way Alt can b free then u can use it as u do in windows OS

[MunCHeR]

Thanks anoe_nomus very much for the info, i got the alt key doing nothing but the viewports dont do anyting now with the alt+mouse buttons(sure I'll work it out eventually.Got twinview going and its an absolute treat tearing of a panel and having it update in real-time not like windows (where do you want to go today....over to the other window and preferably still working! :wip: )

Thanks a bunch

MunCH

[1000101]

Originally posted by NueFoX

And Gentoo is not faster then Redhat. They all use the same Linux kernel. It is the software and drivers coming with redhat which is slowing redhat. Gentoo is a minimalistic Linux distro :)


Actually; though the guts of the kernel are the same; gentoo has a vastly different set of kernel patches applied than redhat does. Redhat typically patches for stability and just to add hardware; and gentoo is typically patched to add features and occasional speed boosts.

However what makes a gentoo system faster (at least on this older pIII 800) than redhat 7.3 (and especially 8 and 9) is the fact that its built against specific CPU optimizations. Redhat allways builds every binary as an i386 so it will run on every 32 bit x86 CPU (and even AMD's new best) in existence. Gentoo will build all of your core libs; X11; gnome; or whatever; based on the CPU you have in your system. Sometimes theres no performance increase; other times (like with gnome) theres a pretty big benefit, particularly on old slow machines like this SGI 330.

and of course; it doesn't have to be minimalistic at all (even redhat can be minimalistic). I have a fully featured system that does everything joe average would need his system to do; plus a few utilties only I would use.

[Mazer]

Yes Gentoo looks amasing, but you must have a very fast conection to do the level one install and its absolutely not suited for teh beguiner...
If someone is still having trouble editing a simple startup srcipt or configuring the alt key it would be a giant leap to go and build a complete sistem from source....

For redhat, what I did was recompile the kernel and modules (quite a few times till I'v got it wright..) install the latest Nvidia drivers, the Wacom drivers and VERY IMPORTANT turn on UDMA on my sistem using Hdparm.
Then for maya and for pure speed I use fvwm2 window manager with only minors edits on the default .fvw2rc default file. It's not prety but it runs as hell!

[StefanA]

I'm using Windowmaker since I think it's the fastest window manager out there... however... Using WindowMaker and Maya isn't too much fun. As soon as you enter any menu using the spacebar you get a ugly X as a pointer which you don't get rid of.

Sooooo..... anyone has any tips on how to use WindowMaker and Maya without getting that damn X??

regards
stefan andersson

[MunCHeR]

its actually a known issue in the docs, off hand I can remember how to fix it you have to edit a file, sorry I cant be more helpful, do a search in the maya help for mouse pointer and I' sure you'll find it.

Cheers

MunCH

[vaniljus]

Sooooo..... anyone has any tips on how to use WindowMaker and Maya without getting that damn X??

You need to add "MAYA_MMSET_DEFAULT_XCURSOR=1" to your Maya.env file

[StefanA]

Thanks for the quick answer! works like a charm :)

regards
stefan

[artsnake]

Just got Maya 6 running on Debian. Haven't even checked it out yet but I did find the way to get kde configured.

[Sagroth]

Maya 6.5 on Mandrake 10.1, KDE.

Works faster than under Win in a lot of things, though mental ray rendering, fluids simulation - a little bit slower.

[kryoboy]

stage one gentoo + fluxbox, is the bomb. not to mention enlightenments new loader. just wish the rest of enlightments new release was out. i just wish a few things would work for me.. wacom tablet, and a few plugins i use often. So i use windslows. but we do run gentoo on our server.

[ViSUALiZER]

Hi all!
I'am using Maya 6 on WindowsXP and Linux. I'am running it on a Suse 9.1 distribution with Gnome and a Nvidia Card and it is performing very nice exept that i had the same little problem with the X mouse pointer symbol. I found it very very easy to get Maya and Apple Shake running with Suse. Even newbies and artists without a technical mind should try it. Don't be feared, it's really easy and absolutely worth it. I hope more ppl will convert to linux (and maya for linux). It's so great that more and more companies port their products to linux. I started to use Maya for linux to check if my MEL-Scripts are working on other platforms as well and then I decided to turn to maya for linux cause plugin development is free (you don't need Microsoft Visual Studio) and because of the great amount of free and quality tools.
Now I'am really looking forward for Digital Fusion 5 and i hope it will be released for linux, too.

The best thing you can do is to install both Windows and Linux on your box and you can choose the optimal weapon for your artistical or technical problems.

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