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Shifting To Linux


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Hi Everybody....

Our studio is currently working on Windows.

We want to shift to Linux. We are a small studio with 20 people. I don't know anything about Linux. I don't know which distribution will work fine for us. Fedora, Ubuntu, Cent-Os, Suse ??? Is there any performance difference for graphics softwares like Houdini or Maya???? How Flexible and easy or difficult is each distribution???

People say Linux is much flexible for writing tools for a graphic studio. If so, what types of tools can be built??? Which Scripting language will be good? Is there any tool-set available for graphic studio?? Is there any software for Asset Management , like Alienbrain on windows???

Plz share your suggestions....

--------iamjaideep80

Jaideep Khadilkar

TD, Sciclone Motion Graphics

Edited by iamjaideep80
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Hi Everybody....

Our studio is currently working on Windows.

We want to shift to Linux. We are a small studio with 20 people. I don't know anything about Linux. I don't know which distribution will work fine for us. Fedora, Ubuntu, Cent-Os, Suse ??? Is there any performance difference for graphics softwares like Houdini or Maya???? How Flexible and easy or difficult is each distribution???

People say Linux is much flexible for writing tools for a graphic studio. If so, what types of tools can be built??? Which Scripting language will be good? Is there any tool-set available for graphic studio?? Is there any software for Asset Management , like Alienbrain on windows???

Plz share your suggestions....

--------iamjaideep80

Jaideep Khadilkar

TD, Sciclone Motion Graphics

Quite a question.

Here's my take-

We've been using all Linux since 2000 (edit: that's not entirely true - we were using Irix and Windows in 2000 - didn't move to all Linux until around 2002 - right when Redhat7.3 was released). I've tried a number of different distros. They all do about the same thing for almost everything. The differences come with setup, security and package management.

Suse is a good, stable distro. OpenSuse is free & has everything you'll need as a graphics studio. It has really good hardware detection and X setup is pretty easy.

Debian/Ubuntu have *awesome* package management. For administering lots and lots of machines, I can't imagine running anything else. Software updates are a breeze, software installs are perfectly painless. It's really, really nice to never have to worry about dependencies as long as you install through the package management system (called "synaptic" for both distros). For this reason and this reason alone, I switched us over to Ubuntu about 2 years ago. The latest version 6.10, is not my favorite, but I'm hooked on synaptic. On top of everything else, both Debian and Ubuntu come on only 1 CD, and once you install the OS, you can throw the CD away - you'll never need it again - MAN, i love that.

I'm not a fan of any of the redhat derivatives (Redhat, Fedora, & Cent). Granted, I haven't tried them in some time, but installing via rpm was really a pain. The only thing more painful is compiling by hand. Maybe they are better these days, but I still have a bad taste in my mouth from all my Redhat days, so I don't really use them.

Performance - they should all be *about* the same. There was once upon a time when Gentoo Linux performed better because it compiled every package as it was installed, which meant everything was optimized for your computer (3DNow vs MMX and that sort of thing). That doesn't seem to be as much of an issue these days. I would expect nearly identical performance, I mean, they all have about the same kernel.

More flexible for writing tools? That's hard to say. What sort of tools? Compared to what? Sure, Linux distros usually come with a free c/c++ compiler; perl, tcl,python,php,java parsers, etc... Maybe that's what they mean. I find I write a *lot* of scripts that I run on the command line that may not be possible under Windows... maybe that applies? Other than that, lots of the image tools under linux can be had under windows. I find myself using gimp, image magick, and the tools in libtiff (like tiff info) - all of which are available under Windows, though they have to be installed and often run through a command window.

There exists asset management for Linux, though that's a pretty big topic. Timerity comes to mind as an example, but it's a HUGE product... I'm sure there are others.

I'll also recommend Dr Queue as a render queue manager because 1. it's free 2. it's good, and 3. it's free. www.drqueue.org

There are lots of tips and tricks that can be used in a Linux environment to make life easier, but that's probably another topic entirely.

In summary:

- All distros perform about the same re: speed.

- The best distro, imo, makes the hard things easy, but not so easy they become convoluted. To me, software installation and updates, X configuration, and hardware detection are the hard parts - hence my choice of Ubuntu.

- Lots of tools *are* available, but probably not much more than what's available for Windows

- Use Dr Queue. Send a sheckle or two to Jorge if you find it useful. ;)

Edited by BrianK
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  • 1 month later...

From what I know Linux 3D graphics support was really bad/primitive in the earlier days. But now, surprises of surprises, it has drastically improved. Recently I tried maya on Windows XP SP2/Core 2 Duo/1 GB laptop/nVidia 7300 Go acer laptop. As you might be knowing maya takes quite a while to start on(close to a minute or two) and I expected linux to be slightly or greatly worse than time. When I tried it on linux, it was less than half that time on the same machine running OpenSUSE 10.2 with Xgl. It starts up just like any other small KDE app. If you are choosing linux then graphics drivers can be the primary culprits. I've used it on NVidia hardware so far and have found it a breeze and well supported. I'm not sure of ATI. From what I've read on the net ATI is still catching up on the linux front. One problem found was that the text can become garbled evenon NVidia hardware but that hapens only whne Xgl is enabled and not otherwise.

But its handy to have an in house linux guru.Of course you'll get excellent support on the net but its not instantaneous. It can take atleast a day.The MTBS(Mena Time Between Support) can be as high as 48-72 hours and as low as 10 secs(over IRC and other IM services). Another problem I've encountered is that of paths. Especially between windows and linux. You can always use cygwin.

Quite a question.

Here's my take-

We've been using all Linux since 2000 (edit: that's not entirely true - we were using Irix and Windows in 2000 - didn't move to all Linux until around 2002 - right when Redhat7.3 was released). I've tried a number of different distros. They all do about the same thing for almost everything. The differences come with setup, security and package management.

Suse is a good, stable distro. OpenSuse is free & has everything you'll need as a graphics studio. It has really good hardware detection and X setup is pretty easy.

Debian/Ubuntu have *awesome* package management. For administering lots and lots of machines, I can't imagine running anything else. Software updates are a breeze, software installs are perfectly painless. It's really, really nice to never have to worry about dependencies as long as you install through the package management system (called "synaptic" for both distros). For this reason and this reason alone, I switched us over to Ubuntu about 2 years ago. The latest version 6.10, is not my favorite, but I'm hooked on synaptic. On top of everything else, both Debian and Ubuntu come on only 1 CD, and once you install the OS, you can throw the CD away - you'll never need it again - MAN, i love that.

I'm not a fan of any of the redhat derivatives (Redhat, Fedora, & Cent). Granted, I haven't tried them in some time, but installing via rpm was really a pain. The only thing more painful is compiling by hand. Maybe they are better these days, but I still have a bad taste in my mouth from all my Redhat days, so I don't really use them.

Performance - they should all be *about* the same. There was once upon a time when Gentoo Linux performed better because it compiled every package as it was installed, which meant everything was optimized for your computer (3DNow vs MMX and that sort of thing). That doesn't seem to be as much of an issue these days. I would expect nearly identical performance, I mean, they all have about the same kernel.

More flexible for writing tools? That's hard to say. What sort of tools? Compared to what? Sure, Linux distros usually come with a free c/c++ compiler; perl, tcl,python,php,java parsers, etc... Maybe that's what they mean. I find I write a *lot* of scripts that I run on the command line that may not be possible under Windows... maybe that applies? Other than that, lots of the image tools under linux can be had under windows. I find myself using gimp, image magick, and the tools in libtiff (like tiff info) - all of which are available under Windows, though they have to be installed and often run through a command window.

There exists asset management for Linux, though that's a pretty big topic. Timerity comes to mind as an example, but it's a HUGE product... I'm sure there are others.

I'll also recommend Dr Queue as a render queue manager because 1. it's free 2. it's good, and 3. it's free. www.drqueue.org

There are lots of tips and tricks that can be used in a Linux environment to make life easier, but that's probably another topic entirely.

In summary:

- All distros perform about the same re: speed.

- The best distro, imo, makes the hard things easy, but not so easy they become convoluted. To me, software installation and updates, X configuration, and hardware detection are the hard parts - hence my choice of Ubuntu.

- Lots of tools *are* available, but probably not much more than what's available for Windows

- Use Dr Queue. Send a sheckle or two to Jorge if you find it useful. ;)

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