Promise Linux and Blender - Various questions

Support Basics & Interface
1

Hello I am thinking about a new Gnu/Win/Linux distribution called Promise Linux (Details in: httphttp://hispascal.sourceforge.net/phpwiki-1.3.3/index.php/Adrian15HaltPromiLinuxEN)

1)One of my questions is if there would be any way of installing Blender in both Windows and Linux without having to copy the compiled libraries twice in the cdrom.

For installing a program you usually need an installer (which may be a linux one or a windows one) and the libraries associated to the program. Are these libraries valid in both Windows and Linux? So that I can save space on my cdrom.

  1. I want to automatize Blender Windows installation, such as editing a config file or passing arguments to its installer. Could you please explain me it a little bit or give some manual url or whatever?

  2. Is there any way of installing Blender in Windows but running a Linux installer?.. Or at least using wine or whatever. I mean not running an exe file but running a Linux script or whatsoever.

4)In my project Promise Linux one of the objectives is that Windows

Blender Configuration and Linux Blender Configuration should be the same.

The idea is one partition for windows, another for linux and another one (fat32) for shared configuration. So that I install Blender in Windows and I install Blender in Linux and I want both of them to share its configuration.

4.1)The question is: Does Blender store its configuration in

4.1.a) a single file? 4.1.b) a single folder?

4.2) Do I have to edit some Blender files (both in Linux and windows) in order to let it know where the new configuration file/folder is located.

(Of course I am supposing using the same Blender version in both Windows and Linux)

Thank you for your patience and your time. Thank you.

2

Lemme see if I can help you with some of this.

  1. Blender for Win uses two dll files (python22.dll and gnu_gettext.dll). Blender for Lin I believe has some .so files, so you can’t really save any space on the CD. There already is an installer for windows, but I’m not sure about the Linux end.
  2. Not sure.
  3. ?
    4.1) Some files go into blender dir/.blend/ folder, and the b.blend file goes into C:\windows\ in Win, and probably in /home under Linux. Most configuration is in the .b.blend file. However, .b.blend is made upon running Blender for the first time (i.e., it can be deleted, and the default will replace it).
    4.2) No, the file locations are pretty fixed.
    Perhaps, though, you can link the .b.blend file from the windows system to the linux system. For example:
$ ln -s /mnt/win32/windows/.b.blend /home/.b.blend

I don’t know quite how linux links work, whether you should do a symbolic or hard link.

3

  1. You can’t share libraries (easily) btw windows and Linux. (If you can, the wine guys would like to hear from you :wink: ) The libraries Blender needs under Linux are pretty standard and you want them anyway.

  2. The installer used is Nullsoft’s installer ( nsis.sf.net ) and the config for it is in Blender’s source distribution

  3. There are two things you need to do: Extract the program files to somewhere where windows can read them, and update the registry.
    Extracting files can be done under Linux, and you can set up Windows to update the registry when you boot to it.
    AFAIK, the registry for only contains file associations.

  4. Use the symlink technique mentioned above.