Here’s a workaround for running Softimage on other distros like Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Pardus, and Gentoo.
On these distros, some users have noticed problems with images (cannot browse for images, or even create noicon clips). Or Softimage can create and even save scenes, but crashes when you open a scene.

One of the Softimage developers believes he may have tracked down the source of this problem. The Softimage library libdsprsr.so has a dependency on libtiff and libjpeg. If either of these is missing, then the Softimage library fails to register correctly (during the install), but unfortunately no error is reported.

As a workaround you can try the following steps:

1. Open your Softimage shell and source the .xsi file
2. cd to the “Application\bin” folder
3. Run cmdreg libdsprsr.so
4. If you get an error, then you have this problem, so we can try to fix it. Now run ldd libdsprsr.so
5. You should see that 1 (or more) libraries are missing – most likely libtiff and/or libjpeg.
6. Install the required package(s) to get the missing libraries and then run the cmdreg again: cmdreg libdsprsr.so
7. It should register now and all the problems with image nodes will be gone.
8. If you have other strange problem you can ensure that all the Softimage libraries are registered correctly, by re-registering them all by running cmdreg -f XSICOMDLLs.lst
9. If you have any errors, run the steps above checking the failing library with ldd to see which libraries are missing.

Hat tip: Sean Donnelly