Has anyone tried running a Carrara render node on Linux using the windows emulator "Wine". The reason for asking is that I was thinking of setting up a render farm and did not really want to but 5 copies of XP.

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Apparently this has been tried before on version 2. There were problems with the file open and save dialogs but it did run which implies that I might be able to get a render node working....

http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?appId=1619

http://www.floconsdepaques.com/pressbook/tutoriaux/008/008.php

So my experiments this weekend were not too successful. I installed Fedora Core 1 and Wine onto a low specification workstation and managed to install the render node. This started and display a splash screen and a nice gradient fill and a menu. It prompted me for a language. After a short pause it exited before drawing the rest of the screen. I tried installing the service pack and that either errors with an error "An installation support file could not be installed" or when run as a non root user it simply claimed that there was no node installed when there blatently was. Not sure what next... Might try a boot from CD type linux on my main machine to see if it is any better....

Thanks to Arnaud from the Carrara SDK mailing list Copying the files msvcirt.dll and msvcp60.dll (Visual C runtime?) from a Windows machine into the .wine/c_drive/windows/system32 on the Linux machine has worked and I have a stable render node working on Wine and Linux. I did not manage to get the service pack to install but had to copy it from a working Windows node. I'll be writing this up in more detail later.

I'll look forward to reading your writeup! This is a very valuable thread. We have a bunch of Linux boxes in our network and it would be very nice to get them all to play with the PCs. (I've given up on the idea of having PC's and Macs play well together....) Keep us posted! - Dex

Others have also been trying this...so yes would be good to see your results.Has anyone tried an actual carrara install? The performance hit from wine might not be so great. Would be nice to see if it works with other distros also.

Attached Link: http://www.aceanim.com/Carrara/CarraraOnLinux.html

Carrara on Wine sort of working on Ubuntu, some weird issue with the windows wobbling about. I also managed to make it permanently minimized.

Still have a problem with the service pack installation though where it can't find a particular file, last time I worked around that be manually copying the changed files.

Carrara 5 works fine on Fedora or  Suse  with CrossoverOffice, bit (10-20% faster on the renders) faster in fact on a XP2200 512Mb Linux box, than under Windows XP Pro on a XP3000 1.5Gb box.

I suppose you get what you pay for.... to run 5 rendernodes on Wine $0, Crossover Office $199 and $440 for XP Pro.