Linux for Production

I’ve always been in Windows due to my heavy reliance on 3ds Max and other windows-only products, but i’ve been recently been investigating options to expand my knowledge into Linux.

Recently it was recommended to me that Fedora was one of the better setups for a pipeline, but I would be interested to hear people’s thoughts on what distro they use and why.

this is not my own experiences, because I not interested in linux enough, but I’m on a fusion mailing list and some interesting comments where made, I’ll put them down here:

Fedora 9 isn’t recommended for any serious applications yet. For starters they’re using a beta version of Xorg. I tried it with Houdini which looks for the old Xorg/X11 and since it ain’t there any more it won’t run. I also had display problems with [another compositing app]. I uninstalled fedora 9 and installed fedora 8 and everything is great. So fedora 8 would be a better choice.

Even autodesk lists fedora 8 under its qualified operating systems for Maya 2009. The 64 bit flavour anyway.
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=7639522

We’ve been using Vista64bit on some workstations with Fusion for a few weeks now with no issues. We’ve had no other software incompatibilities (including full Adobe CS3 suites). We consider these boxes our “Excelsior” or Great Experiment for 64 bit. Everytime the subject of linux comes up the lack of software availability makes it a non-issue. We’ve centered on Windows and made it work.

The 64bit transition (along with Vista) was remarkably seamless. I’d be curious to hear what issues you’ve had (are having). The only two we’ve encountered were avoidable (as opposed to fatal): No parent button in explorer windows and using the network explorer takes 2-4 minutes to refresh on a domain–and this is avoidable with UNC filenames.

This is by far the complete list of reply’s and centOS was mentioned to.
Can’t say much more about it really… so there you have it :slight_smile:

-Johan

Thanks Johan!

I just found a decent talk about it on CGTalk as well: