Hi,
I’ve been trying to have Blender installed “properly” under Ubuntu by using the repositories and apt-get.
The GUI methods only give you 2.63.
My searches have suggested adding a ppa as follows.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cheleb/blender-svn
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install blender
My searches say this should be 2.63a, but again it only installs 2.63.
Any alternatives? Can I manually install all the 2.63a files from Blender.org to the necessary paths?
Many thanks.
Hi they forgot to add the “a” at the last revision.
You can install the zipped blender 2.63a from blender.org parallel to your ppa install.
Cheers, mib.
Hey you’re right! Thank you.
Neither the PPA nor the ZIP version are marked “a”, just 2.63.
And the PPA is newer at r48451.
The ZIP is only r46461.
But it raises other questions.
The reason I assumed the PPA was out of date was because the Cycles options had changed and GPU compute was not available.
On closer inspection the “Integrator” is now called “Light Paths”.
GPU Compute is only available if you use the Experimental feature set, whereas it was Supported previously. This may be because only OpenCL seems to be available, which was always experimental.
In User Preferences -> System, the compute device is either “None” or "OpenCL. Where has the CUDA option gone? I just bought a GTX 570 so that I would have access to CUDA!
Any thoughts on this?
Is the latest Blender not recognising the GPU’s CUDA skills? I can’t image CUDA support has been dropped…
Thanks again for you original response.
I can’t image CUDA support has been dropped…
No, it has not. 
I can´t remember if the official 2.63a has prebuild cuda kernels included for linux.
To build yourself (on the fly on first render start) you need the cuda toolkit 4.0. Some work with the kit 4.2 version but 4.0 work 100%.
You also need a suitable nvidia driver > 280.
There are nightly builds from blender org, maybe you try one of them. There are exactly build like the official builds.
I have no problems with my GTX 550 Ti (Driver 295.59) on latest builds.
Cheers, mib.
Since yesterday the PPA has updated to r48472.
This fixes a bug where adding a primitive to the scene crashed Blender…
The CUDA bug persists.
However, following your link got me a ZIP of r48479.
CUDA restored!
My nvidia driver is 295.49 FYI.
Hopefully by tomorrow the PPA will have caught up with the “bot build” or whatever it is.
Then I can install properly.
Of course I was never actually trying to be bleeding edge on the build in the first place.
I’d originally been trying to work out how apt-get installs so that I can manually install the latest STABLE Release properly.
No further along there…
Thanks for the insight - it’s been educational!