scene-composition and resolving bugs in Maya for linux

Today I finished up the background And composed it together with all the elements that I have modeled from scratch. Everything that was made out of nurbs surfaces was converted to polygons and cleaned up and combined where needed. With fingers crossed I imported everything to one scene file and began ordering the elements of the island:



Now, while I am not completely happy with this, (the shape of the island is still a bit square-like) , for the animation short- this should work alright. Since there is not much time to work on the way it looks like at this point, I am focusing on starting animation work tomorrow and getting that done in 2 weeks.

Here are some shots I made,just to have some fun with the thing:




http://www.flickr.com/photos/8837376@N07/4482130236/

I know lights suck, but I will leave that part for after I make the animation. Of course , if there is time, I will improve everything that I dont feel happy with (maybe some more work on the skinning and the backgrounds/textures)...


On a side note, I had some screen cursor locking problems on Maya 2010 for linux. The nasty bug would lock my screen and would force me to get out of X to a terminal to kill maya. Fortunately, google granted me the support I needed to resolve it with some copy and pasting. Here is a log file of the fixes I applied:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AYWmGlTeh8z8ZGM3MzY2ZjhfOTdjdzJ3emhmcQ&hl=en

hope this helps other geeks out there