On 5/14/21 5:27 PM, William F Pokorny wrote:
> On 5/14/21 3:59 PM, Bald Eagle wrote:
>>
>> Just went through povr installation with jr.
>> Got the biscuit render, so looked good.
>>
>> Went into qtpovray38 distribution directory to test a .pov file.
>>
>> bald@Alienware ~/povray38/scenes/objects $ povr blob.pov
>> /home/povray/povray-3.8.0-x.povr_b0bcf6c0/bin/povr: 5:
>> /home/povray/povray-3.8.0-x.povr_b0bcf6c0/bin/povr: Cannot fork
>>
>> bald@Alienware ~/povray38/scenes/objects $ povr chess.pov
>> /home/povray/povray-3.8.0-x.povr_b0bcf6c0/bin/povr: 5:
>> /home/povray/povray-3.8.0-x.povr_b0bcf6c0/bin/povr: Cannot fork
>>
>> Any ideas?
>>
> Just guesses.
> 
> The 'cannot fork' stuff usually happens when a unix/linux system has run 
> out of resources to start another process. Lack of memory/swap space, 
> /tmp, /var - maybe. There are sometimes limits on the number of 
> processes in place, but this in my experience is not all that common.
> 
> For starters you could try running the 'df' command and look at disk 
> usage. The command 'free -m' can be useful too.
> 
> Somewhere you posted about your machine... Let me try and find that and 
> I'll post back here if I see anything obvious.
> 

Machine stats you posted look good.

---
Had a few other thoughts meanwhile.

- What was your entire command line with flags & ini ?

- If just say the blob scene you can probably point to a normal povray 
v3.7/v3.8 install and see if you get the same problem.

- You could run the povray command directly. One executable would be in 
the unix directory below where you issued make:

<theMakeDir>/unix/povray blob.pov

- You could copy the blob.pov scene to where you ran the biscuit scene 
and try and run it there.

- You could try (a) to cut the resources required by using the '+wt1' 
and '-d' flags. I guess in that vein you could just run 'povr --help'
while in the 'problem' directory.

- You could try and start another process than some form of POV-Ray - 
say gimp - from within the povr script when you are seeing the error.

- While in the directory with blob.pov, if you run 'ls -l blob.pov' does
it show the read bits set on the left. Something with 'r's like:
'-rw-rw-r--'

... Yeah, guessing. It's been many years since I've seen that error.

Bill P.

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