Apprentice won't launch and installing the latest production has the same issue:
“/opt/hfs16.5.439/bin/hkey-bin: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libfontconfig.so.1: undefined symbol: FT_Done_MM_Var”

Mathemaica seems to have a similar issue (https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/57948), but the applied solution there seems less than ideal for Houdini…

You can move the libfreetype.so* files out of $HFS/dsolib and Houdini should run. We'll look into updating this lib to a more modern version.

Thanks, I went for re-naming both libfreetype and zlib, since zlib errors came up with only dealing with libfreetype…

HongMao
Thanks, I went for re-naming both libfreetype and zlib, since zlib errors came up with only dealing with libfreetype…

Works great!

Same problem here and the above worked. However, now the license server says “invalid machine name”. Any ideas?

I can't say I'm experiencing that problem…but I re-installed Manjaro so I could switch over to KDE, and therefore had to download and re-install Houdini, when the production build was/is at 16.5.496…

Hello, my trouble was similar like this:
# ./houdinifx-bin: /opt/hfs16.5.473/bin/../dsolib/libz.so.1: version `ZLIB_1.2.9' not found (required by /usr/lib/libpng16.so.16)
I found a similar problem with this library:
# https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/kiwix-bin/ [aur.archlinux.org]
So solution is:
# sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/libz.so.1 /opt/hfs16.5.473/dsolib/libz.so.1
Houdini works and I hope, it will be fine.