Now I won’t be proclaiming that everyone should abandon Windows in favor of Linux as I have always stated that as long as the machine is doing what you want you should continue to use it happily. But I will say that it is enjoyable and much more easy to use than I remember from past iterations. If you ever do switch here’s some things to keep in mind (which is valid as I write this, who knows what will happen down the road):

1. Fedora 10 32-bit live cd doesn’t have the samba client pre-installed (easy to add though).
2. Lots of applications that support Linux seem to be available only in 32-bit (Google Gears) but there seems to be a slow push towards adding 64-bit support for some apps (e.g. Flash support for Linux 64-bit just went alpha).

Of course I installed Houdini and for the sake of saving others some searching, here are some things that I did in Feora 10 that got it installed:

1. Get the video card driver for your machine. Sure there is the default driver loaded on your machine but for me at least I needed to the full monty.  For Fedora, I used the ATI rpm as per the instructions here (NVIDIA instructions found here). For the ATI portion be advised that after using the init 3 command you’ll leave the GUI, so be sure to have the rest of the commands written down somewhere.
2. Install Houdini by unpaking the gcc 4.1 build of Houdini and in a terminal going to the Houdini install folder and typing ./houdini_install as root, then follow the instructions. I didn’t seem to need to do add the “source houdini_setup” line anywhere for Houdini to run.
3. If you’re running SELinux, set the default to permissive and when you run Houdini for the first time, quite any SELinux warnings (so you don’t see them pop up again everytime you open Houdini.

P.S. I fixed Windows on the laptop by running chkdsk, but decided to install Linux anyway.

P.S.S. My main desktop machine is still running 64-bit Vista.

First thing that I came across was that when I booted from the DVD I got a black screen. After trying it after a cold boot I finally got it working and got Windows installed. I played around with it for a while and it did run smooth but have have no illusions about that since all clean installs run smooth for a little while and Windows 7 comes very light (if you want them, you need to download a lot separate applications like Windows Live which has Messenger, Mail, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker beta, Writer, Family Safety and others). During the whole time I played with it it struck how much like Vista it was. No real big changes other than what I see as a natural progression of the software. A lot of people are hyping it as a huge change from Vista, but I’m not seeing it. That’s likely due to so much bad press about Vista convincing people it was terrible, so that logically, anything newer must be better. For the record, I like Vista – it does want I want without any issues and I never ran into any issues after I turned off UAC.

I did run into a few issues like the OpenOffice installer failing (conspiracy theorists cry foul here), and a weird error in the Houdini viewport that is persistent (below captured with Windows 7 snipping tool).

This shows up in the Houdini viewport with Windows 7 and a Radeon x700 Pro (and didn't when in Vista was on this same machine).

But I’m not sure I can say that’s a Windows issue since it could be a graphics card OpenGL issue (the ATI drivers I used were beta as well). It’s really hard to judge Windows 7 since it’s a beta – so any issues I do come across (I already submitted an issue to MS) will likely be fixed down the road. I do see Microsoft’s gearing more towards a network centric ideal with their home network feature which is also hooked into the firewall permissions, which is a natural progression in today’s world. I also liked the choices you can make to determine your default search engine, e-mail app, etc.

1. If you visit this site you’ll notice that I added a feed list to the right which is from my Google Reader “shared items.” I’m addicted to 3D related news so I’m subscribed to a whole bunch of feeds. Google Reader makes it oh-so-convenient in that it’s web based and I can do things like shared items, so I thought I would share what I find interesting. I hope it doesn’t make my site too “myspacey” which I would loathe.
2. I watched Disney’s “Bolt” trailer a couple of days ago and normally I’m not impressed with trailers, but the hamster (named Rhino) was so well animated it is certainly worth noting. The hamster certainly stands out to me as a brilliant character from both a technical and artistic view and is hysterical to watch. What was in the trailer I hope was a window into the overall performance of the character, and if it is, the animators of Rhino should be congratulated.
3. I recently upgraded my machine which included a new monitor. For the past few weeks I lived with the colors which always seemed to be oversaturated until I put it to myself to see what I could do with the color profiles. Lo and behold, thanks to this page, I got the colors where they needed to be and now everything looks great.

The problem: After installing Vista, removing the install dvd then rebooting, you get a “BOOTMGR not found” error, and asking you to CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart.

The reason: If you install Vista on a SATA RAID array (alone and not with a dual boot) and you also have a PATA data drive, Vista will be installed on the RAID, but the boot manager will be installed on the PATA drive, so if your RAID is set as the default boot device (which it should be), Vista won’t load giving you the above error.

The solution:

1) Put the Vista install dvd back in the drive.

2) Shutdown and then unplug your computer (safety first). Then unhook the power to your PATA drive.

3) Plugin your computer and boot from the dvd. Select the repair windows option that’s at the lower left.

4) At this point Vista goes into the repair options, however, I got a popup saying that Vista sees an error and would like to repair it. I did this but that didn’t work. What you need to do is cancel that popup and go to the repair options and select the repair link that’s in the repair options list.

5) Follow the prompts to repair Vista.

6) Reboot. Vista should load normally without the dvd in the drive.

7) Now you can shutdown and unplug your computer and reattach the power cable to the PATA drive. Then reboot.

That should do it!

1) Blender.org posted direct links to my site which subsequently caused my host to have bandwidth being sucked away from other hosted sites, which then caused these sites to slow to a crawl and their owners complain. As these sites are actual businesses that generate actual money and support livelihoods, I can understand why the host made the command decision to block my site to cool the bandwidth issue. I’m not sure when exactly it was shut off since I only realized it at around noon. It was for the best though – of that, I am certain. The b.org guys removed the direct links to my site pending a solution to hosting the videos in some other way (e.g. Google Video). The good news is that the site is back, so I hope people find their way back if they found it suspended earlier.

2) I upgraded to Windows Vista Ultimate. That might not be a big deal to everyone, but the cool thing is that I got it for free – legally – as a gift from someone for helping them with computer issues. The only trouble I had in installing was getting it out of the box it came in. Gone are the days of the simple cardboard box you open at the top. I was so thrilled when I got it home, with excitement overpowering logic, I was not unlike early man first discovering the use of tools. I nearly ripped the box to pieces until I realized the instructions to open it were on the package itself – albeit very small.

P.S. I’ve gotten a lot of e-mails and I am slowly beginning to respond to them… sorry for the delay!

P.P.S. I’ve posted an SSE2 optimized build of Blender 2.43 on graphicall. It has the added bonus of the best icon file out there, ffmpeg, and verse – none of which are in the official release.