About a year ago after many, many daily scans and updates for malware problems in my WinXP machine I moved all my internet activity to Linux.  This crud was taking an hour a day of my time.  I did a fresh install of XP and all my graphics software.  I had a hard time with MS as they did not want to reactivate it claining I was puting it on multiple PC's.  That got my goat.  After finally convincing them that that one of my two legal copies was really on one PC they did activate it.  I run Carrara 5 pro, Vue 5, Poser6, Corel Pinter 9 and Xenodream on this PC.  It is not connected to the Internet so there are no updates, no virus software, and it runs about 30% faster and fewer blue screens.  But my ultimate goal is to move all my graphics to Linux...This is getting more and more possible with new tools.  One of these is CrossOver Pro from Code Weavers.  I got this last week and now I have Carrara 5 Pro working directly under Linux.  No luck with Poser6 so far, but I am working on that.  The purpose of my post is let you know there are alternatives to MS. 

What OS are you using? Using render nodes?...would be curious of performance.

Right now I am using the RC2 test version of Mepis.  See Mepis.com  I will move to the regular version as it is scheduled to be released this month.  The render time for the Complex Green scene is 45 seconds which is the same for windows.  The PC's are MSI mother boards with AMD 64 chips at 3000.  One G RAM.  I don't know what render nodes are?  If you have a complex scene to suggest for a bench mark  I'll render it.

i use winxp, and run c5p about 16 hours a day, as well as poser6, bryce, mimic, photoshop, psp10, and vue randomly throughout the day, i must be special since i rarely have a problem, infact poser6 is only one i had a problem with, with its 1gb memory limit -_-

and render nodes, are software on "secondary computers" to help carrara render a scene faster, carrara goes on the main machine, then render nodes on the rest, and it uses all computers it can connect to, to speed up renders, network rendering rocks :)

I don't think that was the issue. They were just letting people know of a linux alternative for running c5. For render nodes this could be a plus, since cost could add up per machine...many commercial companies  use alternative os for this reason among others.
ggrace,
That's where it would really matter is w/ render nodes. There is a benchmark thread here, I believe in the backroom, possibly.

ggrace, thanks for letting us know about this.  I'm not a fan of Windows at all, and do really love Linux (we use Ubuntu on some of our machines at home).  I'll have to check this out; I need to be able to use Carrara, but more importantly for me are Photoshop, Premiere, AfterEffects, and Encore from Adobe.  If I could get them running under Linux without any hit on performance, I'd be a very happy man!

As we make progress in this arena, I'll let folks know.

 - Dex

Sorry to hear you like others I know have gone through that process over the activation BS. That is why I HATE activation based software. I've seen others go through that and I stoped upgrading my OS at Win2000. Hell will freeze over before I beg some dweeb with a bad attitude over a phone to reactivate my software. I have to much self respect to let some company put me through that .

You having Carrara running on Linux is great news! I almost got Poser4 to run on Linux once. I've tried Linux repeatedly in the past using Wine. It looks like CrossOver Pro has gotten way better since I last looked at it. Let us know if you succede with getting Poser6 to run to. It might be worth trying DAZ Studio also.

By the way what version of Linux are you using and did it detect the card type and load openGL automatically?

Fantatic info. Thank you for sharing it!

:woot:

Update from here.  It looks like the Adobe products -- particularly Premiere and Photoshop will be a major uphill battle to get working in Linux because of the way that they rewrite virtual memory.  I'm no computer whiz, here, but my partner is and he informed me that it's going to be very difficult.  Not impossible, mind you, but very difficult.

So, for those of you not using the Adobe products, this is irrelavent, but for those of us who do make use of them, Linux may be a long way off.

Dex is now sad.

But I have to know from mylemonblue -- what the heck is that fluffy bunny error message?  It made me giggle outloud here at work!

-  Dex

Attached Link: http://atom.smasher.org/error/

That is just something I cooked up on a free error message generator web site. It lets you type your own and chose a icon to go with it. When you hit the generate button it appears at the top of the page for you to right click and save. It's kind of cool.

http://atom.smasher.org/error/

:biggrin:

Thanks everyone for your interesting comments.  I have worked some this week on getting Poser 6 and Daz Studio to work under linux without success.  And I am still working on it, although lately I haven't had as much time to play with it.  I think that linux may be a great cost saver in render farms, they won't have to purcase all those copies of Windows.  But since I don't have network I can't test this fully.  It will also be cheaper for those who build their own computers to put linux on them and use Carrara with Crossover.  The Gimp (a free Linux application) should handle most of their post work needs.  I don't have the Adobe software to test but I understand that some of the older Photoshop versions work under Crossover and many people are working on the new versions to work.

No Fluffy bunnys here either ---Glenn