This is sort of a random technical question, but anyways… I have an old Sun Ultra 2 with dual 300mhz processors and a half gig of ram that I’d like use solely for rendering. I’m currently running Solaris 9 and blender runs just fine, however, I feel more comfortable with linux than solaris as an os. So my real question is, are there any glaring impossibilities with running blender as a command line renderer on one of the sparc linux ports such as http://www.ultralinux.org or http://auroralinux.org ? Specifically, I’m refering library incompatabilities or something else along those lines. Any information on this subject would be greatly appreciated!
In terms of finding out what its compatible and incompatible with, your best bet is to visit Blender.org and ask around there. AFAIK, most of the blenderheads over there are running Linux (as 9/10 of most geeks do).
So here’s the deal, blender 2.27 is compiled and running on the sun machine now (I chose suse linux 7.3), but I have run into a problem. My original intent was that I could create .blend files on my win2k machine and then move them over to the sun for rendering. However, it appears that there is some sort of discrepancy between the two blenders. Version 2.27 is installed on both machines, but neither will recognize the other’s .blend’s as valid blender files. I was under the assumption that the .blend format was universal between the different ports, but is there some difference between the big-endian and little-endian versions when it comes to saving files?
I think I may have found an answer to the problem over on the blender.org forums. Someone by the name of Ferris made a detailed post about his own experiences with compiling blender on a sparc64 machine. In his post he made reference to certain changes regarding makesdna and the dna.c file. I’m under the imression that “dna” refers to special loading instructions that are placed in .blend files, so maybe this is my problem?
