Linux access problems - "ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'viewerstate'"

[Memo]

Apologies for cross-posting, but this is driving me nuts and I can't believe I cannot find any information regarding this online.

I'm getting lots of "ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'viewerstate'" type errors on Ubuntu. Full details at  https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/79385/?page=1#post-341733

but TLDR version is:

I installed houdini (18.532, on Ubuntu 18.04) and licensed (Indie) exactly following instructions at https://www.sidefx.com/faq/question/install-linux/

and then this doesn't work:

 cd /opt/hfs18.5
 source houdini_setup => The Houdini 18.5.532 environment has been initialized.
 hscript => gives all of the errors in the linked thread

but this does work:

sudo /opt/hfs18.5/bin/hscript

and so does this:

 sudo su
 cd /opt/hfs18.5
 source houdini_setup => The Houdini 18.5.532 environment has been initialized.
 hscript => works

Is this normal behaviour? Can I not run houdini without root privileges? If I source houdini_setup in my .profile, then none of that env gets carried on over to my sudo, so I'd need to source it as root.

 

Edited June 5, 2021 by Memo

[bunker]

you should read about file permissions:
https://phoenixnap.com/kb/linux-file-permissions

TLDR, you can add the rights to execute "hscript"

sudo chmod +x /opt/hfs18.5/bin/hscript

... and run this one-liner:

cd /opt/hfs18.5; source houdini_setup; hscript

does that solve the issue?

Edited June 6, 2021 by bunker

[Memo]

Thanks for the suggestion @bunker. Turns out it's not a permissions issue at all. I've discovered it's because I had separately defined a

HOUDINI_PATH

environment variable pointing to

/opt/hfs18.5

(for my own convenience). So even though I was running

source houdini_setup

AFTER defining

HOUDINI_PATH=/opt/hfs18.5

, it was still breaking something. (And the reason why it worked as root, is not because of permission issues, but because HOUDINI_PATH was not defined for root).