Why cant blender do any sort of smoke simulation on linux?

I have noticed that in order to do any smoke simulation baking, I have to go into windows and do it there. Altering options or baking in linux is enough to instantly make it quit. I first noticed when trying to calculate a flame+smoke sim that would crash every time of baking right away, because there was a “turbulence” in the scene.

Is there no way to make smoke sim work in ubuntu blender?

This is just a problem with your setup, smoke works just fine on Mint (based on Ubuntu) here.

Is your Linux version of Blender one you got from a Linux repository, or an offical release downloaded directly from blender.org? Repository versions are not maintained by the Blender Foundation and are notoriously full of weird crashy behavior.

OK, well after posting, it now seems to work in a brand new scene, but it just wont bake in my scene.

As my MAIN scene is pretty large and complex, I appended the relevant elements out to a fresh file (attached below). It just wont bake. If you press the bake button, blender quits straight away. Whats going on with it?

s005_icelands_smoke.blend (556 KB)

btw, im using blender 2.66a

It bakes just fine on OpenSuSE with Blender 2.68 and 2.69… But I didn’t get to the end of the 1250 frames. :eyebrowlift:

2.66a also makes this sound suspiciously like a repository version. Every time in the last few months when I’ve had a Linux user with a crash problem, they were using 2.66 or 2.66a and it was from a repository. Can you confirm whether or not you actually downloaded this directly from blender.org? For that matter, can you upgrade to the current version on blender.org and test again?

OK just to confirm, the blender version I had was 2.68a from the ubuntu software centre. It doesnt have any later version than that on there. I have got 2.68a now from the site and that is working ok so far! Should i just keep checking the site every now and then and manuyally get the latest versions?

Yeah, don’t get blender from any ubuntu source ever again. Just get it directly from blender.org. The release schedule is pretty regular, so it shouldn’t be hard to keep up.