Hi everyone,
We’re doing a bit of an impromptu survey here. We’re curious how Deadline has been performing for those people using Linux and OSX.
If it’s been smooth sailing, we’d like to know. If there were some hoops you had to jump through to make things work properly, we’d like to know that too. We’re trying to get a good feel for how well loved our non-Windows targets are.
Thanks,
Edwin
In general, it’s been relatively smooth sailing. Mono brings its own share of quirks which cause the product to be occasionally irritating (especially when dealing with text fields or when menus become orphaned). I did wonder if there might be scope to have a self-contained Mono install within the installation, to avoid these version-specific issues that arise (e.g. Mono 2.8 being problematic for Deadline, but fine for other apps). The UI does seem to feel rather fragile though - again due to Mono, I guess. Sub-menus don’t behave reliably, sometimes disappearing as you are mousing to get to them.
It’s all niggles rather than genuine problems, and almost all of it comes from Mono (from what I understand). I don’t know how much communication flows between Thinkbox and the Mono folks, but it would be good to have Mono tweaked to avoid these things.
On the Deadline side, it would be handy to have the logs available within the OS infrastructure (console.app under OS X), perhaps via symlinks or similar, that would allow people familiar with OS X to review them. It also looks like the remote admin stuff is also solely set up for Windows - the references to vncviewer.exe comes to mind, and suggests that I cannot use OS X’s inbuilt framework for accessing nodes using VNC. I think I tried it with Chicken of the VNC a while back, and it didn’t seem to want to work.
We’re seriously considering bundling Mono with Deadline to try and put a stop to this version hell. Recent versions of Mono (2.10 released this month) has brought back scroll bars in the ListView control, so that seems like the best candidate going forward. Thanks for the input, it’s greatly appreciated.
Cool. As noted, there are a few places in the app where the Windows-genetics are still visible, such as the VNC program definition. I recently picked up a license of JollysFastVNC and hope to find time to see if that plays nice when I point DL at it.
Any thoughts about the log file locations, etc?