Houdini Vs. The Fiesty Fawn - This HOWTO describes the step necessary to run Houdini 8.2.13 on Ubuntu Linux 7.04 (Feisty Fawn)

http://www.cgarena.com/freestuff/tutorials/misc/ubuntu/index.html [cgarena.com]

Good stuff - I went through much of this about a month ago. I finally resolved my problems with SUSE and went back to that - which essentially just works.

I agree with the conclusions at the end - Unbuntu tries to pass itself off as a desktop that's easy and requires no advanced knowledge - but of course this is only if your requirements fit within a very narrow range of usage.

FWIW, the very first thing I did when installing Ubuntu is to:

> sudo passwd root

which gets rid of that nonsense with the no-root account. It saved endless typing. I think the notion of no root account is one of those misguided notions that might be OK for a real beginner, but it just an exercise in carpal tunnel syndrome for everyone else. Unlike a lot of Linux fanboys, I'm not of the opinion that Linux needs to somehow “beat” Microsoft as the desktop of choice. It will never happen. That doesn't mean it's not a great desktop and OS for the professional, though.

Cheers,

J.C.