Installing Maya 2009 sp1 on Kubuntu 9.10 |
Not too long ago Alex Combas posted an extremely useful article on his website on installing Maya 2009 sp1 on Ubuntu 9.04. His directions are very precise and came in quite handy when I decided to try and move away from Fedora. After successfully installing Maya I started encountering strange problems. With what seemed to be a random occurrence Maya would behave as if the ENTER key was being held down. I could not change attributes, and if I did something like press PrtScn for a screen capture Ubuntu would go into an infinite loop of screen captures and I would have to manually reboot the whole computer.
Now I can hear that annoying little voice echoing from some elitist IRC channel on freenode:
zOMg U nuB, D!s4bL3 sT1cK3y K3yS U NuBZ0rZ!!!!!!!
Thank for the in-depth advice, you little cretin. I had already thought of that, jackass. After disabling everything I could think of (and yes I went to the gconf-editor) the problem persisted. The only way to kill it was to open the script editor, which would start creating series of empty lines, from here I would hit BACKSPACE to kill the bug and for the moment everything would return to normal. I also found some obscure post on some obscure Linux forum of a semi-related issue. The idea was to add some code to the xorg.conf file to block USB peripherals from auto-mounting. For a brief time I continued to work in Maya and did not experience any problems, however considering the amount of devices I use (from my wireless mouse for my laptop to my Wacom tablet) this was not a solution I could work with.
So finally after looking at some screen shots of some colleagues of mine, who are running CentOS 4.4 in their respective studio, I noted that they are running an older version of KDE. So installed the KDE desktop and after a couple weeks I hadn't had one incident. Shortly after that Ubuntu released 9.10 so I opted to do a fresh install strictly using Kubuntu. Upon installing Maya I had found that things where slightly different from the how-to posted by Alex. Because of this is I have chosen to write my own article. Much of what you will see here is originally from his site with slight modifications to accommodate a fresh Kubuntu installation, and of course my own little touch.
Getting started
This is a fresh install of Kubuntu, the only other thing I have done is run the updates. My home directory is as such:
$ ls Desktop Downloads Music Public Videos Documents maya_install Pictures Templates
The only addition to the default folders is a folder called “maya_install” containing the RPMs and license file. I will now navigate to this directory to perform the rest of the installation.
$ cd maya_install/ $ ls AWCommon-11.5-19.i686.rpm aw.dat Maya2009_0_64-2009.0-452.x86_64.rpm Maya2009_0_64-docs_en_US-2009.0-63.x86_64.rpm MayaBonusTools2009_0_x64-2009.0-391.x86_64.rpm
We already know, from Alex's article, that there are a couple packages that need to be installed right up front.
• csh - Shell with C-like syntax, standard login shell on BSD systems
• rpm - package manager for RPM
$ sudo apt-get install csh rpm
Next we follow Alex's advice to a 'T':
$ sudo mkdir /var/flexlm $ sudo cp <your Windows Maya 2009 license file “aw.dat”> /var/flexlm/ $ sudo chown 444 /var/flexlm/aw.dat $ if [ ! -f /usr/tmp ]; then sudo mkdir /usr/tmp; fi $ sudo chown 777 /usr/tmp
Now we try and install Maya. A little note before moving on: You do NOT have to type the entire name of the package. For example type out the rpm command and options ONLY.
$ sudo rpm -ivh --nodeps
Add a space and type a capital 'A' and hit the TAB key. Since there is only one file that starts with a capital 'A' the name of the first package will auto-complete. Next type 'M', TAB, type '2', TAB, type '2', TAB, and auto-complete fills out the next package. I will let you figure out the rest.
$ sudo rpm -ivh --nodeps AWCommon-11.5-19.i686.rpm Maya2009_0_64-2009.0-452.x86_64.rpm Maya2009_0_64-docs_en_US-2009.0-63.x86_64.rpm MayaBonusTools2009_0_x64-2009.0-391.x86_64.rpm rpm: please use alien to install rpm packages on Debian, if you are really sure use --force-debian switch. See README.Debian for more details.
Argh! We didn't get this on Ubuntu, so now what? Well the command line gives you two options. One is to use alien, which converts RPM packages to DEB. I have not had 100% luck with alien, and this can take awhile which is annoying for some who is impatient as I can be. The second is to add --force-debian switch to the rpm command.
$ sudo rpm -ivh --nodeps --force-debian AWCommon-11.5-19.i686.rpm Maya2009_0_64-2009.0-452.x86_64.rpm Maya2009_0_64-docs_en_US-2009.0-63.x86_64.rpm MayaBonusTools2009_0_x64-2009.0-391.x86_64.rpm Preparing... ########################################### [100%] 1:MayaBonusTools2009_0_x6########################################### [ 25%] 2:AWCommon ########################################### [ 50%] 3:Maya2009_0_64 ########################################### [ 75%] 4:Maya2009_0_64-docs_en_U########################################### [100%]
./CHEER!
Maya is installed, so lets try running it from the command line. Why the command line? Because if something goes wrong we will get feedback. Double-clicking an icon doesn't do that for us.
$ maya /usr/autodesk/maya2009-x64/bin/maya.bin: error while loading shared libraries: libfam.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Argh^2! There is a library missing that seems to install with Ubuntu but not Kubuntu. A query of the libfam name yields 8 results, though there is only one of them we actually need.
$ apt-cache search libfam libfam-dev - Client library to control the FAM daemon - development file
Install the missing library.
$ sudo apt-get install libfam-dev
Let's try running Maya again and see what happens. You may see this error in command line, but Maya will still run.
$ maya Error: default temp directory /usr/tmp does not have write permissions.
If you ignored me and ran Maya from the icon then you wouldn't have seen the error. However you may notice the viewcube looks a little dodgy. To fix this we need to set new write permissions on the tmp directory.
$ sudo chmod a+w /usr/tmp
Now we don't get any errors and the viewcube doesn't look dodgy anymore, though its usefulness is debatable.
Now we need to disable the ALT key from moving the window. Open the System Settings from the menu:
Settings > System Settings
Or press ALT+F2 and type System Settings and hit ENTER.
Locate 'Window Behavior' and open it.
Change the modifier key to 'Meta'.
To disable the composite feature. First BACKUP your xorg.conf.
I don't have one...
In some cases you may need to go through and manually installed the graphic driver for your system. There is a GUI tool but it may or may not work. You will need to go Google and search for installing the correct graphic driver for your system. There are official Ubuntu pages that cover this in great detail. READ THE DIRECTIONS THOROUGHLY!!!!! After the driver is installed correctly, and you reboot, you should have an xorg.conf file.
For starters, here is a link that helped me install the ATI drivers for my laptop.
OK, getting back to where we were at. Backup xorg.conf.
$ sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup
Use what ever editor you want, I will use vim. You may need to install vim (apt-get install vim) first.
$ sudo vim /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Press 'I' to insert and enter the following.
Section “Extensions” Option “Composite” “Disable” EndSection
When you are done press the ESC key and then the colon ':' and enter 'wq' and press ENTER write out the changes and quit the vim editor.
The last thing we need to do is keep Maya from turning the cursor into a big black 'X'. Navigate the Maya user directory.
$ cd ~/maya/2009-x64/
Inspect the Maya.env file. Most likely there will be nothing displayed because this is a fresh installation. Hit Ctrl+Z to return to the command line.
$ less Maya.env
Using the cat command we will append the necessary text to Maya.env. After you enter the cursor will go to the next line. Type “MAYA_MMSET_DEFAULT_XCURSOR=1” and press ENTER, then press CTRL+D.
$ cat >> Maya.env MAYA_MMSET_DEFAULT_XCURSOR=1
Inspect the contents of Maya.env to ensure that it worked.
$ less Maya.env
CTRL+Z to exit. Now go have fun.
- Ed
