A huge THANK you to the OTOY support team. You got me. You have my respect and my loyalty. Kudos to all of you, especially Zhuofang Dai!

Not everything is about render speed.

I've yet to see a Cycles render match the quality of what Octane can do. Especially when you do in render DoF.

It might not be by much but Octane still beats Cycles when it comes to realism.

You want realism? I think Luxrender or Indigo look a bit more real ...

For the first time I managed to see an Octane screen (the one selecting the card on the first run) but nothing more after that.
What I did was :
1. Installed normal blender 2.79
2. removed blender configs and all files regarding blender-octane
3. Installed 4.05 blend-octane using sudo.

Now I ...

Then reinstall as normal, it's confusing, but you have to use sudo to install, but not to run them.

Funny, I don't recall having to use sudo to install. But then again I tried it so many times since yesterday I stopped taking down notes about it. Do you think I should try sudo during the ...

I only used sudo when everything else failed... I agree with your assessment but unfortunately this is not the case.
I am now trying to install blender through the normal channel and see if maybe a stupid library missing allowed blenderOctane to run but still didn't allow it to connect.

Usually I get into this:
crtlZ.png

I just pressed ctrl+z on the blender to force Octane to start... if froze giving the message "Starting Octane engine"

Then I press ctrl+c on the terminal

crtlZ.png

I am running out of unlocks experimenting with this... arghhhhh I'll go back to my coding ...

One thing to try is to run Blender from the command line in a terminal and see if there are any error messages. A lot of times that can shed light on the problem. Your driver is fairly new, I'm running 440.64. Were you able to test version 20.7?

Jason

It seems that the most important message I ...

Version 20.7 is not for us who never upgraded more than V4. I thought it was but I had a silence error when I tried.
I am guessing it's some kind of library issue.
blender even when run in debug didn't show any messages that helped. I wonder if I could somehow force octaneserver to run in debug mode ...

I got the driver that comes with mint updates... 435.21
I can run the octane benchmark.

Yesterday I tried a little something as I remembered that we used to link files between lib folders to make this work.
I unpacked the app file and copied all the lib files into /usr/lib and /use/lib64

It doesn ...

Long time no seeing grimm.

Yes I have my server running but it can't connect to blender!
Once a render is about to start (or even if I try to open up octane settings etc) everything blender freezes untill I kill the server.