Hi guys.

I'm using Houdini 19.0.657 in ubuntu 22.04.
When I click the "?" on any window to get the help browser, nothing happens. Anyone experiencing the same thing?

I have no idea what you mean but the help can be found like this ?

This is what I mean.

nelpiper73
This is what I mean.

yeah, I hear that it doesn't work for a lot of Linux users. it works fine for me on Cent OS though.

There's a (temporary) workaround, for the moment.

In the shell where you sourced your houdini environment, start with:


(or "houdini", for the non-fx variety). This will fix it.

Thx Protozoan.

Can you elaborate a bit better on your fix please?

How do you normally start your Houdini?

path to my houdini: /opt/hfs19.5.303/bin/hindie-bin

I assigned "super+H".

The super-H is a nice touch

So in your case you would use


as the command that gets run by your hotkey, and it'll work for the moment.

Without trying to force this onto you, I would consider an alternative to this type of startup though.

A lot of people and companies run houdini from a shell. You pop open a terminal, and (assuming it runs a bash shell or compatible), you'd set up the correct environment for it like so:


From then on this shell has the correct environment and paths set up (reminder: when executing a shellscript, it'll create a sub-shell and kill its environemnt upon completion, sourcing a shell script however retains the environment for as long as the shell lives)

Then you go (back) to your project directory, and start it from there, like


This of course can be reasonably automated.

Some of the advantages are:

- It's easy to have several sessions of different houdini versions open at the same time. Want to directly compare 19.0 and 19.5? Make two different shells, that source a different environment and start two houdini sessions
- The shell acts as a nice and quick console. All error outputs go there (and into its logs), also your own print() stuff
- When you have it you can use the shell to use all the command line tools that come with houdini from within your project structure, like iconvert and all the others

It's well worth looking into.

This was working for me on Linux Mint until yesterday. Now I have exactly the same problem as shown here [www.sidefx.com].

Same problem. Not working in Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS