Long version: I spent a lot of time using Blender back when I was a pre-teen/teenager (you can check the age of this account, pls forgive my cringy old posts) and I knew my way around really well before the big UI redesigns. I’m one of the few who really loved the old design that people complained about so much. But it’s time to move on, and I think the easiest way for me to re-learn where everything is would be to compare the version I remember to the latest version, side by side.
I’m comfortable with the command line and sorta know my way around Ubuntu’s internals, although I’m not super familiar with the main dependency chains (I mostly learn when stuff breaks, and it usually doesn’t).
Thanks!
PS: To anyone wondering why I haven’t moved to Ubuntu 20 or 22, my hard drive is too full to get through the upgrade process and I’ve just been putting off the weekend project of moving stuff around to get that to work.
Nothing. I’m going to try it with 2.49b right now. I suspect my python might be a problem since I think I’m on 3.x. Maybe I should run it in a virtualenv with 2.6? I feel like there might be other issues. Not sure if I can “run from command line” somehow and get an output with clues.
Blender ships with it’s own bundled python, you shouldn’t need to do anything.
Unizip and navigate to the directory in the command line, and open blender from the command line:
./blender and see what it says
It can’t find “libjpeg.so.62” and exits. This is where I get fuzzy, I have no idea if that’s it’s own package or part of something else, etc.
exact output:
blender: error while loading shared libraries: libjpeg.so.62: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
EDIT: Installed libjpeg9 and libjpeg-dev with apt, getting the same error. I figured libjpeg-dev was an older version that might contain what I need, but no such luck.
Hello, fellow old timer (I joined two weeks after you)! The first version of Blender I used was 2.28, and I started using Ubuntu back with Hoary Hedgehog. Here are my best suggestions:
Try the python 2.6, x86_64 version blender-2.49b-linux-glibc236-py26-x86_64.tar.bz2 as it is built against the newer of the two python versions, and without checking what is in 18.04, that is the one more likely to be compatible,
If it doesn’t work out of the box, you can try the .deb and see if your package manager resolves your dependencies for you: blender_2.49b-ubuntu0904_amd64.deb,
If none of those options work, copy down the errors you get when you try to run or install it and paste them here for further troubleshooting.
Break Break.
It appears that while I was drafting this message, there’s been a whole conversation, but I did the work, so I’m not going to delete my above suggestions.
My last suggestion is that if you are using a 64-bit processor and a 64-bit install of Ubuntu, you may get better performance from a 64-bit build of Blender - so the download I listed in suggestion 2.
Anyway, I hope your learning journey goes well, and feel free to message me if you have any questions about old vs new Blender!