I liked Ubuntu so much I just decided to stay on Ubuntu rather than going to MS Windows 7, however atm I do have Windows 7 & 8CP working as secondary OS.
another reason why I choose to stick with Ubuntu is because its linux based and its an industry standard in VFX & Animation studios.
I was trying since 3 days to get maya working, firstly I had problem with space. And I was getting deb build failed while converting rpm to deb using alien.
for i in *.rpm; do sudo alien -cv $i; done
so i made a ext2 partition of 12 GB from my disk using GNOME Disk Utility, and converted rpm to deb successfully next I needed to install maya
and this does have lot of help on the Internet how to install maya on Ubuntu since Autodesk does not officially support Ubuntu. So I followed this page by Stefano.
Almost fine till the end when you will not find libssl.so and libcrypto as mentioend by him for which I discovered these files in x86_x64 directory under /usr/lib/x86_x64/ and then I made links of these two library file inside maya2012_x64/libs directory. And I have Maya working....
check out the screen shot below.
Pre install terminal script
$ sudo apt-get install csh tcsh libglw1-mesa libglw1-mesa-dev mesa-utils libaudiofile-dev libaudiofile0 libaudiofile0-dbg elfutils gamin libxp6 libxpm4 libxt6 libxp6 libxmu6 libxau6 libxinerama1 libxprintapputil1 libxprintutil1 xfs xfstt ttf-liberation ttf-mscorefonts-installer xfonts-100dpi xfonts-75dpi alien
add may icons on your desktop
sudo ln -sf /usr/autodesk/maya2012-x64/desktop/Autodesk-Maya.desktop /usr/share/applications/Autodesk-Maya.desktop sudo ln -sf /usr/autodesk/maya2012-x64/desktop/Autodesk-Maya.directory /usr/share/desktop-directories/Autodesk-Maya.directory sudo ln -sf /usr/autodesk/maya2012-x64/desktop/Maya.png /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps/Maya.png