Blender 2.50 and 2.49 together

A couple of days ago, the 2.49 scripts were removed from the blender trunk version (2.50). This means that when you install the 2.50 version, the 2.49 won't work fully anymore. But it is quite easy to make both work side by side:

  • The user settings aready use different files (.B.blend for 2.49 and .B25.blend for 2.50) so nothing to worry about
  • The scripts folders can be set to a custom path. What I do is to keep the standard .blender folder for 2.50 so it gets updated when I recompile (actually it is a link to the .blender folder inside my compilation folder), and I created a .blender24 folder, containing the old scripts. Then, in blender 2.49, set the script path to that one in the preferences, and the job is done!
  • You can then create two different links (or two different launch icons) to the two blender executables. If you are on linux, you can even create a "blender" link in your /home/user/bin folder pointing to the blender 2.50 executable, so it overrides your system-installed blender...