Installing & Running Houdini on Linux

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Since my workplace often ran their 3D tools on Linux machines, I decided to set-up a "linux box" and install Houdini (among other things) at home.

Obviously installing software onto a linux computer is different to the quick and easy installation process on a Windows PC. So here are the steps I took to get it up and running on Ubuntu:

1. Download the installation file from the SideFX website.
2. Run the following on the .tar file you just downloaded 
    (the version I had downlaoded was houdini 16.5) :
tar xvzf houdini-16.5.378-linux_x86_64_gcc4.8.tar.gz

3. Then run:
sudo ./houdini-16.5.378-linux_x86_64_gcc4.8/houdini.installer

4. Once you have run through the installation, in order to get the 'houdini' command to work in                terminal you need to setup the houdini environment variables, such as the path to the Houdini              binaries (as stated in the houdini readme).

    In order to do this you must cd into the following directory (/opt is the default install location on          Ubuntu, so if you are running on a different OS, yours may be different) :
cd /opt/hfs16.5.378/houdini/

5. Once you are in the install location, you can run
source houdini_setup
    which initializes your current shell's environment to run Houdini. Now if you run the command          'houdini' it will launch Houdini.


Now if you don't want to have to cd into your install location and run the source command every time you start up terminal you will need to the source command to your '.login' file.
Now this file for Ubuntu is called '.bashrc' and is located here:
/home/<user>/.bashrc
I find it easiest to edit files like this using nano which is similar to vi except is has it's commands for editting, saving, etc down the bottom.

I wasn't certain on the best method for adding this command as I don't have a whole lot of expierience with messing with these things, so I kind of just hacked something together that works easily enough for me (and comments regarding a better way to do this would be awesome).

So I just added the following to the bottom of the .bashrc file:

# setup Houdini env
cd /opt/hfs16.5.378
source houdini_setup
cd ~

Now if you open up a new shell you will see 'The Houdini 16.5.378 environment has been initialized" and you will be able to run the houdini command from anywhere in the terminal.

However once I did the installation, when I would start up houdini, it would not load correctly. It appeared to be an issue with the graphics card (an Nvidia 1050ti low profile).
Apparently this is a common issue and after a quick google I found THIS post that fixed my woes.

All I had to do was add:             HOUDINI_OGL_SOFTWARE = 1
To the following file :                ~/houdini16.5/houdini.env


And now my Houdini is up and running on my linux machine :D

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