Stefan Viljoen wrote:
> Stephen McAvoy wrote:
> 
> 
>>I put POV-Ray in the system tray during a long render. Now I cannot
>>see it to check on the progress. Using Task Manager I can see that
>>pvengine.exe is running in the Processes tab but not in the
>>Applications tab. Just before this occurred iexplorer crashed and now
>>Task Manager does not show in the system tray either. It looks like a
>>reboot to me but I don't want to stop a render that has been running
>>for 10 hours or so. Any advice?
>>
>>Regards
>>        Stephen
> 
> 
> This is EXACTLY why I installed Linux on my system - one of the greatest
> motivators was stability during rendering.
> 
> Have you considered partitioning off 5GB or so and installing a Linux
> distribution there expressly for rendering? This is exactly what I have
> done - I still design scenes in Windows, but then render them in Linux - I
> have often left traces running for weeks at a time in it. Modern
> distributions are a snap to install and setup, and Povray runs like a charm
> on my RedHat 9 system. One caveat though is that most Linux distributions
> (as far as I know) still can't reliably read or write NTFS - which is why I
> expressly installed XP with a FAT32 filesystem. This allows full
> compatibilty - I design and finalize in Windows, then crank up Linux and
> with one minimal ini-file change I render, in Linux, on the Windows
> partition, using the scene just as it is. You just have to take a little
> care with how you specify paths, as those can cause a bit of problems. But
> otherwise, great!

Gee, that's a good idea. I have a few extra gigabytes I could split off.

The only reason I wouldn't like that is that it would make it difficult 
to run some of my Windows apps (HotSync for my Palm, etc) during a 
render. (tho I use Thunderbird and Firefox for all my web stuff so 
that's not an issue.) I've already learned the hard way to only use 
"safe" apps and play "stable" games while a render is running. :)

I was also under the general impression that Linux has a smaller RAM 
footprint than WinXP (what I run on my main PC)...is this true? That 
could speed things up a bit. My 1Ghz Athlon runs faster than our 1.1Ghz 
P4 just because of the extra 512MB RAM I have in it, but of course it's 
not all wholly available no matter what OS you're running.

~Mike

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