I’ve been playing with the idea of getting some cheap quadcore motherboards, RAM and HDs and build a renderfarm. I didn’t like the idea of getting a Windows licence for each just to run one program on them.
So I tried installing the DRSpawner via Wine on my Ubuntu box. And it works perfectly!
I was checking out prices yesterday and found that it’s only be about £1200 for four 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Quadro computers. (Mainboard, CPU, RAM, HD and PSU) Not bad for 16 2.4GHz processors. (And this is Norwegian prices, elsewhere it’d be much cheaper. I expect nearly half the price in the US.)
I’ve just tested th DRSpawner render under wine and it works fine.
Just to complement the information, you need to install some windows runtimes (VisualC++, I believe) to the default wine installation.
They are the vcrun2005 and vcrun2005sp1, which can be installed by a neat script called winetricks (it downloads and installs it in the local .wine folder, no need to be root).