Okay guys, i promise. But in several days. I’m traveling now and it is hard for me. In a week i’ll be back in Bulgaria and i’ll try to write down a tutorial.
Cheers.
Was it a difficult process? I’m on Ubuntu 7.10, but any tut for any distro would be awesome!
It’s working!!!
And practically no performance hit it seems!!!
Man I can beleive it. I have butterflies in my tummy! 
So here’s a link to a video to prove I did it. It was so easy. can’t beleive I didn’t do it earlier.
http://slegrand.blogspot.com/2007/12/zbrush-3-working-under-ubuntu-linux.html
I mess around for a little while at the beginning but stick with me.
I will write a tutorial this weekend… but I warn you all, it aint even worth that it’s so simple.
Like Erroroman said, get the latest stable wine release. On ubuntu you’ll need to ad the repositories as follows: http://www.winehq.org/site/download-deb
Once that is done, go to system>administration>synaptic, search for wine and upgrade it.
Then go to your windows install. Get vcomp.dll (either in system32 or in C:/WINDOWS/WinSXS/ in one of those long name folders. (do a search)
Grab that vcomp.dll and put it in yu wine C://WINDOWS/system32/
Then grab your windows installation’s C:/WINDOWS/WinSXS/ folder and copy the contents to your equivalent wine folder. In that folder make sure Manifest has a capital at the begining… the default wine one is witten manifest not Manifest.
now run zbrush…
If it tells you it can’t find C:/WINDOWS/zresources, do it dirty like me and just copy your zresources folder to your wine C:/WINDOWS/
and voila…
Try that and don’t hesitate to ask. Sorry it’s very late here and I’ve been working hard, so I may not be making sense… but hell I’m happy! 
that’s good news! I’ll try this out tonight!
2 things:
-
Can you get ZApplink with GIMP to work? I got it working in windows, but I wondered if it works in Ubuntu with wine?
-
Is that the demo version or an activated 3.1?
- Can you get ZApplink with GIMP to work? I got it working in windows, but I wondered if it works in Ubuntu with wine?
I’m not sure. I doubt it. I hvan’t tried installing the 3.1 update yet. So no Zapplink for now. But you’re right it’s a must. I use it to death. It might be able to launch a program within wine, if you have photoshop 7 installed on wine or something like that. You may also be able to trick it, by making it open anything that reads psd’s (irfanview, acdc, xnview) within wine, but then editing the actual file it creates with gimp then saving it, as far as I know that’s how zapplink talks to the external apps, simply by reading the file it just wrote.
- Is that the demo version or an activated 3.1?
Neither. It is an unactivated full version. (Using the 8 day grace period).
edit-- Yes it is possible to write to disk with no problem at all, you just need to write your WINE directories. It’s not possible to write to a unix path, that’s all. So no worries mate
Thanks for the update my friend. I too wish to try this out parallel to you, but my time over the next few days is just plain crap.
I will try out it all this weekend and will see if I can activate my 3.1 copy under Ubuntu. I do not expect it to work, and I doubt very much Pixologic will give us the widows registry entries we need for wine to activate so I am not holding out much hope of this working. Though Pixologic are very user friendly company, I’m sure they also want to keep their software as secure as they can. And understandably so. Though any input from them on this would be welcome! HINT! 
Anyhow, I will help with this as soon as I am able. Good luck!
EDIT:
By the way, if this is seen as illegal, could a moderator let us know NOW. I have no intention of being on the wrong side of the law and do not want to upset Pixologic.
I moved the Zresources file over to wine c:/windows/ but when I start I get error after error after clicking ok. The error says cannot open h//zresources and about 10 diffrent file names after that. However h: is one of my ntfs-3g drives that has nothing to do with Wine.
I noticed this thread hasnt been updated for a few weeks I was just wondering if it was still being watched?
Well I got Zbrush 3 to work in Wine. However it doesnt start off to well. At first the screen gets all scrambled but after a minute or two it opens up fine.
The big problem is when I do the Zbrush 3.1 update. Its like the update doesnt update the executible file. Even though it leaves one on the desktop if you click it you get an error that says “file made in previous version this version is not compatible”. So I tried to uninstall it and it says it did it but the short cut and file system is still in the Wine tree the the files are gone.
Also before I do get the working screen to come up I get another error that says “WinTab Services not available”.
Ill keep updating If I make ground.
EDIT: Ok so I finally got the Icon removed by going into the Main menu and deleting it. That was a big no no. Apparently it didnt uninstall properly. Every time I open the installer I only get the Modify, Repait, Remove options. When I click Uninstall it goes through the actions and says successful but it doesnt uninstall it. Likewise I dont get the short cut back in wine either.
Its a shame too because simply activating the .exe in the main ZBrush causes a massive error. I can load from a desktop shortcut but I dont want to do that.
Next step: Figure out how to erase all the data so I can start over. Hopefully not remove Wine in the process. But if its the only way.
Heh! I said I was going to try get this working too, but I think this is going to be one of those applications that is just not going to port over to Linux too easy without the ZB dev team helping out. :rolleyes:
Ho hum, Pixologic, it’s up to you guys!
Did your attempt go any better then mine?
Sorry no,
Though to be honest I only got so far before I got overwhelmed with two issues.
- I am new to Wine and Ubuntu Linux and was fast getting out of my depth
- I am concerned by the legality of this. Although we are not hacking or cracking ZBrush, we are License holders and messing with the program to “change how it works”…well I dunno. So I wanted to see if Pixologic had any input on this. So far the answer seems to be that they cannot support ZBrush with things it was not designed to do, which is fair enough. And they are working on getting 3.1 to Mac users right now, so a linux version is way off, though not dissmissed out of hand.
Basically, I think for now, either you use a V3 with wine, and no ZApplink or other 3.1 pluggins, though how long you put up with that… Or suffer Windows for now, that just needs a boost in hardware to run resonably. Not ZBrush’s fault, just Windows OS overhead.:rolleyes:
Or get a Mac when 3.1 is released for it.
I dont play with MAC OS I wont use any software that you have to buy an entire harware system to use.
I build my own machines and Apple simply wont let me do that.
Wow, that’s great! You got it running on a linux! A ZLINUX AT LAST!!!
Questions abound:
- Have you tried upgrading to 3.1?
- My WinXS folder is about 6 gigs large. Is there a specific folder that zb needs? I don’t want to have double of files that size that goes mostly unused.
- ultra-dumb-n00b question: After all is setup, how do you run zbrush? Just double click on zbrush.exe? Wine setup an example with notepad by default installation. How do I get the zb shortcut there?
- I wonder if Pixologic would like to comment on the legality of running zlinux like this?
None of us have gotten 3.1 working yet. I couldnt fnd the exact winsxs folder I hade to move about 6 gigs as well.
Also I had to do a install so that it would make me and icon that would launch it. When I tried to launch it from the .exe in the folder it would tell me it couldnt do it.
Linux Zbrush? Sure… but not until the OS X version is ready
okay i know this might be crazy, but considering some people have gotten linux to run on the PS3, has anyone been able to get zbrush to run on it under linux?
That will prove rather fun…
Issues: You won’t get to make use of any of the cores save the main one as Zbrush was not written to handle this.
It should run, after all it’s the essentially the same chip in the G5’s Apple used to sell.
Memory mapping may also be an issue.
YDL has a kit out now I believe to make life easier, unless you are trying Gentoo or some other bleeding edge distro.
It’s been awhile since I had that stuff in my hands, we did some early beta testing in the beginning, but support was very limited. I may go back to it at some point, but I was disheartened with the compilers.
Keep us informed…
One cool thing about the powerpc portion of the cell processor is capable of running two threads simultaneously (sort of like dual core), but an application has to be specially written to use the cell parts like Jason said.
One bummer about the PS3 is that there’s only 256Mb of ram. So it would probably not be suitable for something like ZBrush. You can get cell based computers (i.e. not game consoles), but they are a might expensive.
Good news is though, is that nvidia is working on hard general programability of their hardware (CUDA). AMD recently aquired ATI, which got them access to lots of engineers steeped in designing parallel hardware. Intel is working on its answer too, and there’s also Sun’s Niagra – which has 8 cores that can run 4 threads each (that’s just freakin’ sweet). Taking advantage of Niagra doesn’t require a massive rewrite like the cell or a gpu based answer would, and it’s here today unlike Intel’s answer. Too bad there’s no software for it. 
Anyway, the cell is, AFAIK the first architecture that breaks the long single pipeline mode to be produced and sold in true mass numbers that is really accessible to programmers. It’s darn cool, and it’s just the beginning.
Oh, and BTW, there is also a version Fedora for the PS3. Which is nice, if you started with Redhat back in the day like me and have not decided to devote the brain cells to getting used to another distro. Like me.
If you can’t tell I’ve been lusting after a PS3 for awhile now (Linux, Virtua Fighter, and the yet to be released LittleBigPlanet ), but I’ve been questioning the viability of the platform. However, Sony has deep enought pockets to see it though, and it looks like Blue Ray may just win the High Def format wars. So it looks to me like it might just be a viable choice for a platform to learn from and play with. 
I have zBrush 3.1 running in Linux. It has been part of an ongoing experiment using virtualization that started on my Macbook Pro, first with Parallels and moving to VMware Fusion. I created a virtual windows XP machine on my Macbook pro using VMware Fusion. I then installed Player 2.0 on my Ubutuntu 7.04 system. It was amazing how easy it was to move my Fusion VM to Player. I had zBrush 3.1 in that VM, so for a kick, I tried to start it. It ran, no problems. It is every bit as good as the Fusion version.
It would be nice to have zBrush native to linux. This would give me one more reason to abandon windows, altogether.
neilford
Thats why you probably never gonna have a native zbrush on Linux. Its called monopoly!!! :mad: But i guess we have discussed it already for many times.
Cheers man.