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Steve <ste### [at] zeropps uklinuxnet> wrote:
> I'm running a pier to pier here at home, I have one fast machine running
> Windows XP Pro and one old fairly slow machine running WinME.
>
> I want to work at the WinME machine but run POV on the faster XP machine.
>
> I have POV=Ray 3.6 installed on both machines. Is there a different
> version of POV that I need to make this possible or is there some WinXP
> trickerie that I should employ.
It probably depends on what exactly you want to do - or rather, how comfortable
you want to do it.
If you want to run the POV front-end (GUI) on the WinME machine, but have the XP
machine do the actual work as the back-end, in such a way that your daily
workflow doesn't change from when you were running POV on a single machine, you
will probably have to wait for the 3.7 to become ripe for this mode of operation
(don't know if it is already to any extent; the current work seems more focused
on multitasking, to pave the way towards network rendering).
If it would be ok for you to change your workflow a bit, and instead of running
POV from the GUI you would copy your render task to some shared directory, and
wait for the result to pop up in some other shared directory, then POV 3.6 with
some more or less simple script ("batch file") would probably do the job.
How strongly will the XP machine be focused on running POV? Do you actually need
XP?
I myself am just in the process of going two-machines right now as well, but as
I will only use the new computer for raytracing for now, I decided to go for
Linux instead.
I found it was actually no big deal to set up a Linux system these days. The
benefits are:
- Costs: It's cheaper than Windows because you can get it free on the internet
(even full distributions like Debian)
- Connectivity: It's pretty simple (once you know how, or know someone who does)
to set up a Linux box not only to share files and communicate with the Windows
world, but also to do everything you'd ever want to do remotely from the
Windows machine (or almost any other OS for that matter) for no extra money,
using a remotely accessible desktop that is just as comfortable to use as
Windows.
- Automation: With its shell scripting environment, you can automate virtually
everything (I must confess that I have some experience in this area from a few
years ago).
- Efficiency: Unix is designed to do real work, not toy around and make life
excessively comfortable for the user - leaving as much computing power as
possible to your render jobs. You can get comfortable user experience, but you
can just as well go without it whenever you like.
- Reliability: Unix is designed to run servers 24-7, and robustness is therefore
kind of hard-coded into the operating system. Installing new software will never
ever require a reboot. Changing system configuration will virtually never ever
require you to restart the computer. A dying programm will never ever kill or
even stall the whole system. Getting the system down on its knees doesn't just
require a software error - it requires genuine malice. Okay, I'm a bit
exaggerating here, but you can safely go to bed knowing that your 72-hour
render job will still be alive and kicking tomorrow, and the day after, with a
reliability typically limited only by the hardware it is running on.
What would Windows give me instead? I'd pay for a system with a very convenient
GUI I'm accustomed to, which I might even be able to access remotely depending
on OS version (though I think it would need Add-Ons for WinME), and which
typically runs stable unattended for 24 hours, which also provides scripting
features. But as I hope to get all the rendering stuff automated, I will not
need a GUI too frequently, the Windows Scripting Host is of no use to me
because I have no experience with it whatsoever, nor do I know anyone who uses
it to script POV-related stuff. and an up-time of 24 hours is not long enough
for some of my renders.
For comparison: I haven't had much trouble with crashes with my current XP
system, until I began to have it up and running all day long to render complex
scenes. Ever since, I experience crashes roughly after 24-48 hours of up-time.
The Linux system has been running almost constantly at full throttle (seldom
less than 75% CPU usage, mostly 100%) for about 5 days now (basically since I
installed it) without a glitch - except for when my Windows machine crashed
while I was working remotely from there on the Linux machine. Even then,
altough the remote desktop access got jammed to some degree, not a single
rendering task was hurt.
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