Documentation:Unix Section 2

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Features

This section lists significant new features in the Unix version of POV-Ray 3.6, compared to the last release (3.5). It does not list new features of the rendering engine, but only of the Unix version.

I/O Restrictions

The Unix platform specific part of the I/O Restrictions feature has been redesigned for POV-Ray 3.6. The configuration file format has changed as well as the way the settings are interpreted. How the I/O Restriction can be controlled in the Unix version is described in the I/O Restrictions Documentation.

As a quick summary, I/O Restrictions control where the POV-Ray core code may and may not read or write files. By default, this is turned on and is fairly restrictive (read/write is allowed in the directory that the main input file is in, and read is allowed in the standard installation directories).

Note: The I/O Restriction code may not be completely mature yet. Please report any bugs you may find.

Display Options

The Unix version now has a single binary which supports display using the X Window System, or using the SVGA library (SVGAlib) on the console (GNU/Linux systems only), or via text graphics otherwise. If the command-line options or INI files turn on display, the following heuristic is used to determine what kind of display should be used. If the DISPLAY environment variable is set, the X Window display is used. Otherwise, if the user is on the console, and has permission to do so, SVGAlib is used. Otherwise, text graphics are used.

Text graphics display a crude 75x24 ASCII version of the image which can be useful none the less to monitor the render progress on a text terminal. Using text graphics and the Verbose (+v) option simultaneously will not work very well.

Benchmark Mode

POV-Ray 3.6 for Unix provides a new mode to render a built-in version of the standard POV-Ray benchmark scene. See the Benchmark Rendering Mode documentation for details.

Sample scene render scripts

POV-Ray 3.6 includes a set of shell scripts to automatically render all the samples coming with POV-Ray and that generate HTML files to easily browse the sample scenes. See Rendering the Sample Scenes for more information.

KDE integration

The binary package for x86-Linux (povlinux.tgz) comes with an install script that generates some useful entries in the KDE panel for convenient access to the POV-Ray documentation and configuration files.

The generic Unix source distribution also comes with the kde_install.sh script to perform the same task. This script is derived from the install script above.

What's new in POV-Ray for Unix

This section covers version 3.7 changes and new features that apply to POV-Ray for Unix. See the section Changes and New Features Summary for information about non-platform specific changes.

Reworked --benchmark:

The built-in benchmark now accepts +L<path> command-line options
now ONLY reads the provided any INI file.

Added preliminary Linux support for these two features:
- CPU timer; might return incorrect results depending on the platform.
- signal catching (e.g. when aborting a render by hitting Ctrl+C).
Added support for 'pause when done' in linux build.
Added support for --benchmark on unix works together with +wt and print built-in features with --version
Unix default file gamma changed from from 1.0 to 2.2.

Trademarks

Getting Started