Login / licensing Arnold on no-GUI terminal only Ubuntu Linux

[tariqJ3RXK]

Hi everyone,

I'm having issue logging in to Arnold (to activate the license, and then use kick rendering command) on my rendering node that I have terminal only access to it with no GUI since it runs inside a docker container. 

What I downloaded is this: Arnold-7.4.0.0-linux.tgz which I just extracted.  After installing the required dependencies, I tried to run ArnoldLicenseManager in order to login, but I got an error says: 

root@9feb9ebfeebc:/workspace/arnold/bin# ./ArnoldLicenseManager

qt.qpa.xcb: could not connect to display
qt.qpa.plugin: Could not load the Qt platform plugin "xcb" in "" even though it was found.
This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

Available platform plugins are: xcb.

Aborted (core dumped)

Any idea how to get around this?

Many thanks.

Tariq

[MartinBeh]

(deleted, did not notice the "terminal" part)

[tariqJ3RXK]

Who could help with that? Thank you!

[Stephen.Blair]

You'll never sign in without a GUI. The sign-in requires a user interface, which is what the Arnold License Manager provides.

Ubuntu isn't a supported OS for the licensing components, so I don't know that it will work. The Maya forums have a few threads about that.

[tariqJ3RXK]

Alright, thank you! Then how do other cloud rendering services support Arnold if there is a GUI needed and what are the supported OS for that? Could someone give us advice? Thank you!

[Stephen.Blair]

Render farms don't use single-user licensing. They use network licensing.

Single-user licensing is not right for render farms.

• You have to sign in every 30 days, on every machine.
• If the machine is a cloud instance, then that sign in disappears as soon as the instance shuts down. So you have to sign in again.
• Sign in requires a GUI, so that makes it harder on headless machines (eg on Linux, you have to use some kind of X forwarding)
• Single-user licensing is tied to a specific machine, so it's harder to have a dynamic allocation of machines to a render project.