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Alias/Wavefront Announces Port Of Maya To Red Hat
Several readers pointed to the announcement that 3-D Graphics tool Maya will be ported to Linux. Darkfell quotes the release : "Responding to demand from leading studios worldwide, Alias/Wavefront will deliver Maya on Red Hat Linux in early 2001.
story at biz.yahoo.com" The high-end graphics world has sure seen some strange convergences and redirections in the past few years, what with the prematurely announced death of the Macintosh, concerted marketing efforts to replace UNIX with NT, and now ... welcome to the turn of the century, guys.
I can't wait when a company announces a product and it is just assumed by everyone that it will run on Linux because it does and because that is what the market wants (the same way its assumed today that it will run on Windows). Maybe then, the actual software will be the story and not the fact that it runs on Linux!
Does [Red Hat] have extensions so that that product only will run on it?
No. That would be Microsoft strategy. A vendor saying they release something only for Red Hat Linux usually means they compile it on Red Hat Linux, so they'll require the library versions we're shipping (stuff like glibc 2.0 vs. glibc 2.1, libstdc++ 2.8 vs. 2.9 vs. 3.0).
Installing a couple of compat libraries will usually permit you to run it on anything else (just don't count on getting support if you do that).
We're all for LSB support - we wouldn't play any tricks to create Red Hat Linux-only software even if we could. (And we can't - since we release everything we do under the GPL, someone could just "abuse" the code easily).
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One reason is that there are minor differences in the different distributions. These differences are at times large enough to cause a product to act erractically on one distro, while working perfectly on another.
Companies find that it is easier to test the product using only one distribution and then release it saying it works using that distribution. By doing this, if they say that it works on Distro A and then someone using Distro B comes along saying that it doesn't work the company can tell them that they didn't test it, which is why they didn't say it would work with Distro B.
Today the Linux distribution that has the spotlight is RedHat, so companies use it to test with.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
these announcements really underscore the need for a standard linux base or something similar.
.deb, .rpm, .tgz, .slp (or whatever format) with some supplied tools. then a software vendor would only have to create a single package, and either convert it, or offer the meta-package which the end-user could convert.
but from what i can tell, the lsb only determines what libraries and such should be installed. perhaps a better solution would be to create a meta-package format, which could be cleanly converted into
in any case, until there is a standardized linux base/package system, this sort of thing is going to continue. it's no different than software houses developing for msft; they are the market leader in terms of number of users. similarly, redhat has a higher percentage of users than any other linux distro. it's all about getting the biggest market possible for their software.
=--- - - .
They can't support every distribution. By saying it works on RedHat 6.2 they are giving you a tested platform to compare against. Will it work on other distros? Most likely. If it doesn't you know you can always see what's different between your distro and RedHat as a possible cause of the problem.
I wish more companies would do this. I saw on a Lightwave (another 3D app) newsgroup someone said newtek (the company that makes it) would never make a port of lightwave to linux, linux people aren't the type to buy lightwave. But with software like this, everything else revolves around it, the OS, the hardware, input devices etc. So the question is, not will linux people run lightwave, but will lightwave people run linux? I think the answer is yes, because of many different factors, especially memory management and stability. I hope this encourages many companies to do the same thing, then many hardware vendors may jump on and make drivers for linux to support video capture, graphics tablets and a host of other stuff ( not even to mention better 3D support which everyone wants!). This could really be where linux picks up quick if the right people want it to.
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Why choose one distro? Because it's not a moving target. Many of the people that are the first to bitch about how Slackware, Debian, SuSE (I'm a SuSE user) aren't supported probably haven't ever used an application of this class.
Anyone that's every put any time in a *production* environment, not a maw-and-paw ISP, knows that major application vendors support a very small subset of the possibilities.
I've supported A|W products on SGI, as well as Oracle under Digital UNIX and Solaris - the two products' purposes have nothing in common - but why don't you check out either vendor's support site. On the sites you'll find that not only is a specific version of an OS supported - but *only* with a specific set of patches installed. If you're not running *exactly* the specified rev level, you can kiss your tech support goodbye until you're matching their spec.
When you have something this large and complex, you can't be coding for a moving target. Even smaller applications can be bitten by this. I recall trying Linux Mandrake a while back, and finding that the library set it shipped with was horrid. Netscape would crash just about every time I tried to send a message. I switched to SuSE, and everything worked peachy.
While I'm not a huge Red Hat fan, the reality is that RH holds a dominant position in the Linux world. They've got the capital now to handle liability issues, and they've got the clout to throw around to get things like this done.
I, for one, am thrilled to see Maya ported to Linux.
Can Slashdot ever post some good news like this, and not get a crowd of fucking whiners?
and that's exactly what I saw.
How can people be so dense as to not understand the needs for standardization, and the reason behind not porting every program to every single platform and distribution?
Why won't anyone discuss this instead of crying that anyone who releases a linux application should produce, support, and test 175 different versions of it?
I come from a studio of 50+ octanes and 40+ VA Linux boxes and we use Maya exclusively. This announcement has been expected, but it has been a long time in the waiting. I figure that A|W should have done this earlier, but I would rather wait for a stable product than get an earlier release with bugs.
SGI has had a box to support this for at least a month, yet no good products to use on it. This will be a welcome addition to our studio as I am sure to studios everywhere.
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
They have versions for NT, IRIX and Mac, and with a completely custom interface, porting would NOT be a problem. No "which GUI shall we use" type problems, since Lightware does all it's own UI.
I encourage everyone who loves Lightwave to take this opportunity to write to NewTek and politely request a port. If you're in a buying position, point this out. They've always ignored such requests in the past, but they can't hold out forever.