Latest revision as of 19:23, 21 June 2014

1 Introduction

Arch Linux is a rolling source-based distribution. It has an official package manager called 'pacman' and its extension 'yaourt' that installs community contributed software packages. The packages installed in this distribution are source-code based, which means that the distribution always gives access to the newest software versions. This can cause some problems when building and installing foam-extend, as for example PyFoam has been ported to Python 3 (see) but not been tested under working conditions.

2 Installing rpm-org

Install rpm-org, and remove rpm if you have it already installed.

   yaourt -R rpm 
   yaourt -S rpm-org 

3 Installing and configuring virtualenv python virtual environment

Arch uses Python 3.*, and foam-extend relies on Python 2.*. To easily switch between python versions, virtualenv is recommended.

Install easy_install

   yaourt -S python-setuptools

Install virtualenv:

   sudo easy_install virtualenv

Configure the python2.7 environment for foamext:

   virtualenv -p python2.7 --no-site-packages ~/env/foamext

Source the python2.7 environment for foamext:

   source ~/env/foamext/bin/activate

4 Building foam-extend

Once virtualenv and rpm-org are installed and virtualenv is activated as shown above, follow the tutorial that shows how to build foam-extend on Linux, the rest of the steps are exactly the same as shown there.