I am soo in love with this povray thing! Thanks community for a great thing!
I've been poving on my windows desktop for a couple months. Onward, i was
hoping to get povray to do a render every hour from my linux server of a
dynamic pov file. Basically, a 3d landscape of my webserver with night and
day based off system time and traffic logs showing up as lights inside
buildings etc. I have root, so i installed povray 3.5 no problem, and test
rendered via a ssh Putty shell window from my Windows system at home.
I was simply typing (from my pov folder) povray ./gigtown.pov I was getting
my output file gigtown.png looking povy and dandy. Everything was working
great. Next up i wrote a perl script to auto render this pov file every
hour.

Here's the script if anyone's curious.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
#Cwd and chdir for when i am run as cron
use Cwd;
#content-type for my hopefuly option of running as cgi
#print "Content-type:text/htmlnn";
print chdir("/var/www/gigfoot/gigfoot.net/www/3d/")."n";
print getcwd()."n";
print "Rendering Gigtownn";
print system("povray ./gigtown.pov");
exit;

This works great via my ssh shell when i run it. It starts pov i see output
all is well.

Then i found the same problem two other folks have reported in this group,
I cannot render from my crontab entry or from a cgi script. I tried it as
root and as a reg user, Made a bash script too hoping cron would run that
and povray would get the input, but bash result sends me Page Segment
fault.

From reading these posts, i am lead to believe the only way to run povray on
linux every hour like i want is to recompile it from source. I already
installed the povlinux.gz already (the non-source version). I am not sure
how i can uninstall povray, i haven't seen any docs on uninstalling it.

I'm hoping for some guidance before i proceed.

1. Anyone know of a way to run povray via a crontab? or a web cgi without
recompiling? I've got root access and run suexec. I've tried a bash, perl
script, and a scheduled command, none of which allow me to pass the pov
file i want to generate.
Also, for what it's worth, i will never need to change the pov file's name.
It will always be the same source file if it helps. I like security and i
wanted it this way since i may need to run this as root.

2. If i need to recompile, how do i uninstall the non-source code version i
already installed? Or how do i force install the source version overtop of
it.

3. My box is purely a webserver, no display will ever be needed, i was
hoping to purely render to output files, quickly and quietly. Seems like
someone maybe had this desire before me.


Sounds like i need to
1. uninstall povray first
2. download and make configure the source code
3. reconfigure to not use the x server

Any help aor feedback is generous and appreciated.

P.S. i have a windows server too, but i was sooo hoping to do this on Linux.

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