Making NVil run on Linux...

I've been running Win10 since it was first released. Very happy with it. It runs all my old and new software really well.

Only thing I found slightly annoying about it is that you need to go through and adjust your privacy and advertising settings. There is plenty of info out there on how to do that.

I don't think I will be able to look into this soon. It is a very huge task.

I understand. I'm not pressing, because for the time being the gain wouldn't probably be worth the effort yet. However please keep it in mind. Perhaps someday when you have nothing more important to do, you'd sit by your workstation and WHAM! Next month we have a brand new NVil on Linux. 

I've been running Win10 since it was first released. Very happy with it. It runs all my old and new software really well.

Only thing I found slightly annoying about it is that you need to go through and adjust your privacy and advertising settings. There is plenty of info out there on how to do that.

Hi Kevjon. It's not the speed that is the main problem, but data mining and disclosure of private data to third party affiliates and business partners, whoever they might be. Unless you are running an Enterprise edition (acquirable through volume licensing), you can't turn telemetry completely off as it resets to Basic level. And even the Security setting in Enterprise (lowest telemetry setting in this edition) still sends the data out. It's impossible to know what kind of data gets passed to MS servers without decrypting telemetry packets or analyzing the source code - which is closed of course.

adjust your privacy and advertising settings

There shouldn't be any advertising software embedded into operating system in the first place. Especially in a system for which people pay. Won't you agree?

There shouldn't be any advertising software embedded into operating system in the first place. Especially in a system for which people pay. Won't you agree?

I'd prefer there wasn't but luckily there are plenty of web pages around to show you how to turn it off.
Its embedded in quite a few places within the operating system. https://www.howtogeek.com/269331/how-to-disable-all-of-windows-10s-built-in-advertising/

I had a quick google and some web pages state that data mining in 7 & 8 is the same as 10.

Anyway, not trying to sell you on the idea of 10.

Back to the topic at hand !
Blender has a linux version.

I was just watching a youtube on Virtual Box https://www.virtualbox.org/

I wonder if this was installed under Linux whether your could run Windows 7/8/10 virtually inside Linux and use Nvil.

Hi Kevjon.
I don't think this would work. In fact, I'm fairly sure it wouldn't. While with virtualization we can run pretty much all of the current OS'es and their desktop and console applications perfectly well, I have yet to see an example of a modern 3D-enabled program running flawlessly in VirtualBox. There are many problems with 3D acceleration in virtualized environments, which include very little VRAM you can dedicate to the guest system, VRAM clashes and possibility of overwrites, and some more (or so I've read).

Otherwise, we would already have hundreds of YouTube videos showing how well 3D games perform on VirtualBox or other similar software.

Kevjon,

I decided to give it a try, because you never know. On VirtualBox 5.2.8 with host extensions installed (2D and 3D acceleration enabled and 256MB VRAM allocated to guest system) and VirtualBox running on Windows 7 Pro host (with the same guest system) I tried the following:

Basic Direct3D support (guest additions installed from safe mode): only 1024x768, slow NVil GUI redraw and poor performance in general. Lots of redraw artifacts (black rectangles of varied dimensions) are appearing on screen during some actions.

Experimental Direct3D support (guest additions installed from safe mode): very slow empty viewport performance (~17-23 fps), but my custom radial menus are working and there are no no visual artifacts appearing anywhere. Same desktop resolution limit for some reason. This is the closest I could get to a working NVil.

Guest additions without Direct3D (installed normally) -OR- guest OS without guest additions installed: SlimDX crashes because of no Direct3D present.

So in both D3D cases, NVil running on a virtualized Win 7 is unsuitable for production.

What puzzles me is that when I run Win 7 on my Debian laptop, I can not only choose pretty much any desktop resolution in VirtualBox, but the resolution of guest Windows 7 desktop scales to fit VirtualBox window size. I don't know, perhaps there's some problems with host extensions for Win7.

Hi RD

I thought about my suggestion some more and decided even if you had got Nvil running flawlessly with virtual box it doesn't really free you from winodws although it would be a more convenient solution than a dual boot computer.

A heads-up to those who want to give Wine a try,
I been trying to run Nvil at Linux too.. and then I read that 64 bit .NET not working in Wine (https://forum.winehq.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=29489).
So we are out of luck 

Edit 29th June 2018:
I have made another attempt with wine, and found that SlimDX installs on wine32 but with problem on wine64, so it's not just .NET.. and I thought maybe I can live with it running on 32 bit system, but after a few days of trying different combination of options, the furthest I can get is still the same as what rubberDuck report on his first post, Nvil runs, displaying UI and freeze.

Hello,
I have good news and bad news.

Good news is that I just finished a short modelling session in NVil on Debian. Well, sort of...

After reading your post Miica, I decided to give it one more go. This time using a completely different method: with UltraVNC server installed on my current workstation (Windows 7) and TurboVNC client on a 10-years old Debian laptop. The result: success.

On TurboVNC's "Tight+Medium Quality JPEG" preset, the performance feels like something around 30 fps. It may not be lighting fast, but well enough to let me work in NVil without much inconvenience. Additionally, polycount only affects the server computer, so as long as it has some juice left for encoding, or the LAN clogs up, frame rate on the client system will remain stable.
Delay from keypresses and mouse buttons is barely noticeable.

Of course the bad news is that this method still requires a separate Windows machine. Though the server may be configured to run headless.

That's very clever, hahaha.. and I remembered in my previous company, where we have limited 3ds max license, we have one or two machine that we remote into (using Windows Remote Desktop Connection) to use 3ds max, it kinda works, job gets done.

but.. for a single person workflow, I think these are hard to overcome:
1. need to start up and run another machine (this won't be a problem in a company where the machine can be run 24 hours)
2. transfering mesh between Nvil to Maya (I did this a lot, as most of my final mesh edits will be in Maya)

Moonlight looks interesting (https://moonlight-stream.com/).

If it's true what they say on their page then it's much faster than Turbo/UltraVNC. And it's also GPL. The caveat is that it restricts you to NVIDIA cards only. I'm also unsure if everything can be streamed with it or just a selection of games.

I gave Moonlight a try, but it turns out that it requires NVIDIA Geforce Experience software, which in turn requires you to be signed-in to NVIDIA services just to take advantage of streaming. So it's a dead end.


I did some further research on virtualization and found some articles about IOMMU (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input%E2%80%93output_memory_management_unit) and GPU passthrough.

Passthrough requires both: CPU and motherboard to be IOMMU compatible, a second dedicated video card with GPU ROM that supports UEFI, a second monitor connected to isolated video card, and of course UEFI compatible Windows version that will run as a guest system. So this solution isn't exactly cheap...

I've read that VirtualBox doesn't support passthrough other than USB if I'm not mistaken, so Xen, qemu/kvm or VMware should be used instead.

There's a good article on Arch wiki about setting up PCI passthrough: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF if someone is interested.

I managed to launch NVil on Wine 3.20 32-bit development version. It works but viewports are super slow so it's not possible to do any actual work. There are also some problems with user interface: slow redraw, "&" characters in menus, some windows (like "Preferences") when opened are pushed into background behind the main NVil window, and fonts are hard to read.

Check this info.
https://www.rocket3f.com/kunena/talks/528-working-fine-in-linux

Hi IStonia,
Do you think you could ask CarstenHintz to post a guide on how he managed to do it?
Like which WINE version did he use, which DLLs he had to manually replace (and from which sources - MS, winetricks?). In general: what were the steps he had to go through because their order is usually very important when making a program successfully run under WINE.