Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2009/11/08/3d-art-in-puppy-linux-with-blender-almost/

Next after GIMP, I wanted Blender for my Puppy Linux machine. OK I really tried Activesync next but it’s a piece of effluvium created by Microsoft and it was beyond my wits to get it to work, it’s difficult to get it to work with Windows never mind Linux.

So – back to my happy place – how to get Blender sorted out so I can create more beautiful 3D spaceships. This forum thread was very encouraging. .

Puppy Linux Discussion Forum :: View topic – Puplet that includes blender ?

And Jade14 had taken the time to provide links to all the files needed to run Blender. Amazing. Thank goodness for nice people like this. So I started downloading and installing, and it took a little while – some of these files are bigish.

I downloaded the version of Blender he suggests as stable (2.8) and then went looking to see if a newer version was available as a .pet – just out of curiosity.

I couldn’t find one straight away, so on with the install. I was careful to install each pet file in the order Jade14 lists in the post. Two of the Python pet files failed to install, but I carried on regardless in my usual devil may care way.

It claimed to have installed successfully, and even created a shortcut to click in the menu, but when I clicked it nothing happened. Heck.

Another forum post hinted that I should restart the x server. That is an option in the menu button at bottom left, and totally easy to do. After I restarted Blender appeared, but it looked sad and injured, blocky pixels here and there, no writing on the buttons.

I had a go at installing those missing Python pet files again. Again both failed. After waiting a few minutes Blender started to work perfectly – except there was no text in any of the menus and no icons on any of the buttons. I know Blender is very shortcut focused, but you need some text menus and buttons to help you along. So how was I to add them?

I got half of the menus working by changing to international English. I used a copy of Blender running on my second laptop to find the button. But it isn’t quite working yet.