Hi

I know this has been asked before, but I can't get it to work.

I run Houdini on Ubuntu 12.04 with Unity enabled. Within Houdini I'm not able to drag and drop parameters or rearange parameters in a digital asset. It seems quite clear that something is capturing the ‘ hold left mouse button’ action.

The question remains how do I make it stop doing so. I really like Unity and I wonder if someone has mananged to get it to work with Houdini?

I haven't fixed it yet, how ever I've found the gconf-editor which might be part of the solution. Does anyone know which option is causing the drag and drop issues in Houdini?

Tip:
If you go in gconf-editor to apps/metacity/general and type ‘sloppy’ in the focus_mode, you get auto focus, which is nice if you happen to have a multi monitor setup.

houdinick
Hi

I know this has been asked before, but I can't get it to work.

I run Houdini on Ubuntu 12.04 with Unity enabled. Within Houdini I'm not able to drag and drop parameters or rearange parameters in a digital asset. It seems quite clear that something is capturing the ‘ hold left mouse button’ action.

The question remains how do I make it stop doing so. I really like Unity and I wonder if someone has mananged to get it to work with Houdini?

Which version of Houdini are you running?

I run Ubuntu 12.04 on my laptop and haven't had any issues with drag'n'drop in 12.1.

There was a bug fixed, a while back, in H12 where minimized windows were being considered for drop targets and sometimes their maximized position would “obscure” the Houdini window. This was because X11 doesn't change the windows' geometry when they get minimized; it just sets a flag saying that they are.

I'm running 12.1.33, do you run the new gnome shell interface as well?

houdinick
I'm running 12.1.33, do you run the new gnome shell interface as well?

Yup. Vanilla installation.

This happens on most Linux distros. On Centos 5.2 and Suse 12.1 (former using KDE 3.3 latter using KDE 4.something) you need to resize the main Houdini window (I have double click the title bar set to do that) then it will work for a while longer until it fails again for some reason.

It's been like that since 11 I believe or even 10, I can't remember. Can't reproduce it to get it fixed

Cheers,

Peter B

That sounds like the other untraceable bug where Houdini confuses the window order.

Unfortunately resizing the main window doesn't work in my case. I can never drag and drop. I do have to add that for instance when I drag a shader in the viewport on a object, then I see a cursor that has a pointer a dotted box and a circle with diagonal line aka ‘not permitted’.

I have that sometimes as well. Could you try to move your preferences out of the way(~/houdini12.1) and see if that fixes things?

Hi Coen,

Good one, that didn't came to mind. Unfortunately it didn't work…
Its a new install of Ubuntu 12.04 and it has been like this from the start.

SESI develops on Ubuntu, so I figured that they should have run into this problem already.

I had the same problem this is the solution. Just set the houdini window to “keep above the others” and it works.

Yet another clever solution :-)
Unfortunately it doesn't help in my particular case :-(

If I compare it to how Houdini runs on my Macbook Pro, the mouse pointer is different, which would suggest that Houdini knows that drag and drop doesn't work.
Which leaves me wondering how to solve this. I sense its a ubuntu problem.

I would say Ubuntu problem. Had similar UI problems with Maya and Unity. Drop down menu just does not show. When unity is disabled (Gnome classic) it works perfectly.

The workaround that I found is to switch from Gnome-Unity (the default) to ‘Gnome 3 Classic’ or ‘Gnome 3 fallback’. It still annoys me that I can't get it to work in Unity, but…

Ah, you might want to try something other than Gnome. Metacity (the Gnome window manager) is a POS, in general KDE is more successful. I also have used xfce (which is much lighter-weight than G and K) successfully.

YMMV

I have found something interesting regarding this problem. I was experiencing the same issue that I couldn't drag / drop parameters. I discovered that this would happen when the Parameter Interface Editor is above / on top of a Houdini window. If I moved the editor off to the side so that it is on top of the desktop it works fine. Moving back over a Houdini window breaks it again.

Its almost as if Houdini / KDE gets confused about the order of the windows and thinks that I'm dragging parameters onto the Houdini window below instead of onto the Parameter Interface Editor.

Maybe this will help a bit?

CheerZ,
Van Aarde.