Houdini 4.0.4 + Linux + NVIDIA


 If you are trying to run Houdini 4.0.4 under Linux with an NVIDIA card, you will likely run into some problems. First, make sure you've got the latest drivers and that they're correctly installed:  Then, the critical bit: you'll need the stdc++ lib from RedHat 6.2, and GLU from Mesa 3.0. You might get by with a different stdc++, but you will definitely have problems with newer GLU libs (like the ones that come standard with XFree4). The good news is that you can leave your existing stdc++ and GLU libraries alone and still get Houdini to work. Simply download these this tarball, extract the files, then copy them to Houdini's dsolib directory, e.g.:

tar xzvf houdini4.0.4-lnx-xtra-libs.tgz
cp libGLU.so.1 libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2 /usr/local/hfs4.0/dsolib

 When you source the houdini_setup script, it prepends your LD_LIBRARY_PATH with $HFS/dsolib, so it should pick up the correct version of the shared libs when you run Houdini. You can check this by running ldd on houdini, e.g.:

> cd $HFS/bin
> ldd houdini
...
libGLU.so.1 => /usr/local/hfs4.0/dsolib/libGLU.so.1 (0x41664000)
libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2 => /usr/local/hfs4.0/dsolib/libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2 (0x41806000)
...

 Also, you'll probably want to turn off AA lines once you get things running. It seriously kills performance on my box. Go to Edit->Preferences and turn off the "Draw Lines Smoothly" option. 

Good luck!