Building Blender Cycles

Building Blender from source is quite hard, especially under Fedora which packages things... strangely.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.5/Doc/Building_Blender/Linux


Gives you most of the information you need.


If you wish to modify the build configuration you should:
cp ./build_files/scons/config/linux-config.py user-config.py  


Currently the following changes are needed under fedora 16 (fc16):

11c11

< BF_PYTHON_ABI_FLAGS = 'm'  # Most common for linux distros

---

> BF_PYTHON_ABI_FLAGS = 'mu'  # Most common for linux distros

90c90

< BF_GETTEXT_LIB = 'gettextlib'

---

> BF_GETTEXT_LIB = 'gettextpo'

137c137

< BF_FFMPEG_INC = '${BF_FFMPEG}/include'

---

> BF_FFMPEG_INC = '${BF_FFMPEG}/include/ffmpeg'

If you don't have a 3D mouse this will make the irritating warning go away:

233c233

< WITH_BF_3DMOUSE = True

---

> WITH_BF_3DMOUSE = False

I had the problem that running resulted in the pythin error:
found bundled python: /home/user/Blender/install/linux/2.60/python
Fatal Python error: Py_Initialize: Unable to get the locale encoding
LookupError: no codec search functions registered: can't find encoding
Aborted (core dumped)

The solution to this I found on this page:

http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.blender.devel/29662

The following script which sets various environmental variables for python then starts blender is suggested:

#!/bin/sh

export PYTHONPATH='/usr/lib64/python3.2:/usr/lib64/python3.2/lib-dynload:/usr/lib64/python3.2/site-packages'

export PYTHONHOME='/usr/lib64/python3.2'

cd ../install/linux/

./blender

Which appears to work.

There is currently the issue that cycles renderer is not actually included in the build... kind of missing the entire point of the escapade... I will edit when I work out why that is...