Revision as of 10:54, 20 October 2012

1 Introduction

This page is dedicated to explaining how to install the foam-extend project in Ubuntu.

If you do not yet feel comfortable using Linux, then perhaps you better first read the page Working with the Shell and train a bit with the shell/terminal environments, so you can have a better perception of the steps shown below.

2 Copy-Paste steps

A few notes before you start copy-pasting:

1. Lines that start with # don't have to be copy-pasted. They are just comments to let you know what's going on.
2. One wrong character is enough for breaking this guide, so make sure you can read the characters properly or that the installed language system does not break the copied characters!

2.1 Ubuntu 10.04

Here you have at least two choices:

• You can install the Deb packages, which provide a quick and easy way for having a working installation of OpenFOAM 1.6-ext. This is the quickest solution for beginners and instructions are provided here: OpenFOAM-dev-1.5 or OpenFOAM-1.6-ext under Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 LTS
• You can install from source, by either:
  • Following the official instructions from here: Building Instructions for Ubuntu 10.04
  • Or by following the detailed step-by-step instructions below (which has been based on the previous link)...

Discussion thread where you can ask questions about these steps: none so far.

WARNING: THESE INSTRUCTIONS HAVEN'T BEEN PROPERLY TESTED YET.

Steps:

1. Switch to root mode (administrator) and install the necessary packages (run one line at a time):

   sudo -s
   #or
   su -
    
   #these 2 lines count as a single line, due to the blackslash "\" character
   apt-get install git-core flex bison rpm g++ zlib1g-dev binutils-dev \
   libqt4-dev qt4-dev-tools libxext-dev libxt-dev
    
   exit

2. Download and unpack (here you can copy-paste all in single go):

   #1.6-ext downloading and installation
   cd ~
   mkdir OpenFOAM
   cd OpenFOAM
    
   git clone git://openfoam-extend.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/openfoam-extend/OpenFOAM-1.6-ext
    
   cd OpenFOAM-1.6-ext

3. Configure the preferences file to specify the usage of the system's Qt 4:

   cp etc/prefs.sh-EXAMPLE etc/prefs.sh
    
   sed -i s/"#export QT_DIR=path_to_system_installed_qt"/"export QT_DIR=\/usr"/g etc/prefs.sh
   sed -i s/"#export QT_BIN_DIR=\$QT_DIR\/bin"/"export QT_BIN_DIR=\$QT_DIR\/bin"/g etc/prefs.sh
    
    

4. For building 1.6-ext itself, it depends on whether you have installed the i386 or x86_64 architecture of Ubuntu. To check this, run:

   uname -m

   Now, accordingly:

   • For i386:

      
     #here you can change 4 to the number of cores you've got
     source $HOME/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-1.6-ext/etc/bashrc WM_NCOMPPROCS=4 WM_ARCH_OPTION=32
      
     echo "source $HOME/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-1.6-ext/etc/bashrc" >> $HOME/.bashrc

   • For x86_64:

      
     #here you can change 4 to the number of cores you've got
     source $HOME/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-1.6-ext/etc/bashrc WM_NCOMPPROCS=4
      
     echo "source $HOME/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-1.6-ext/etc/bashrc" >> $HOME/.bashrc

5. Now let's build 1.6-ext:
   (Warning: this may take somewhere from 30 minutes to 6 hours, depending on your machine.)
   

   # This next command will take a while... somewhere between 30 minutes to 3-6 hours.
   ./Allwmake > make.log 2>&1
    
   #Run it a second time for getting a summary of the installation
   ./Allwmake > make.log 2>&1

6. To check if everything went well:

   #Check if icoFoam is working
   icoFoam -help
    
   #Edit the file "make.log" and check if there are any error messages
   #Example:
   gedit make.log
    
   #Create a tarball in case you've seen any errors (it's the first error that matters)
   #or if you don't understand the output
   #and attach the file "make.log.tar.gz" to a post in the designated thread
   tar -czf make.log.tar.gz make.log




7. Now you can go read the User Guide, which is located at $HOME/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-1.6-ext/doc/Guides-a4/UserGuide.pdf.

Discussion thread where you can ask questions about these steps: none so far.