Do not use the launcher if the Linux machine is headless. You must use the old-style installer.

Download the latest Production or Daily build of the Houdini version you are looking to install.

You do have the option of installing only the license server component with the sesinetd.install script found in the main Linux installation file.

Older distributions such as CentOS 7 and RHEL7 will need to run the gcc9 version of Houdini 20.5. The default gcc11 version will not work

An example of installing only the license server on Linux:

tar xvzf houdini-20.5.522-linux_x86_64_gcc9.3.tar.gz
cd houdini-20.5.522-linux_x86_64_gcc9.3 
sudo ./sesinetd.install

Follow the prompts.

On Linux, the license tools are located in /usr/lib/sesi.

An automated backup of the old version of the sesinetd and sesictrl tools, and licenses file is located in /usr/lib/sesi/BACKUP_SESI*.

Note that sesinetd has now moved to systemd if the distribution supports it.