Installing blender 2.7 on a command shell only linux (without X)

Question

I tried to install blender 2.69 and 2.7 on my debian squeeze but it somehow requires X or another GUI. My aim is to run blender for blender scripting only. Means I have no use for the UI of blender or the installation of X or whatever.

It's mainly a performance issue, cause this machine is intended to do 3d calculations without any unncessary overhead.

I was able to install blender 2.49 via apt-get install, but I would prefer to get the latest stable version of blender installed.

Any one else faced this problem already and succeeded in this?

Any help or hints appreciated.

Cheers kk3003

Answer 1

The prebuilt versions of blender will all be compiled with X11 support, tools like apt-get will ensure that these dependencies are installed before allowing blender to be installed. But once blender is installed you can run it from a cli using the -b option which will prevent it loading the user interface and keep overheads to a minimum.

If you really want to remove the need to install X11 you will need to compile blender yourself and enable the WITH_HEADLESS option. Start here for details of compiling blender yourself.