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GeekoCFD is coming…

GeekoCFD is a live distribution based on openSUSE 11.3 – 64 bit, whose purpose is to provide easy and immediate access to open-source scientific tools, in particular for computational fluid dynamics.

The live distribution was created with SUSE Studio, whose team was very helpful in the process of solving some small problems during the setup. Almost all the packages provided in the images were prepared by openSUSE developers and community volunteers, to whom most of the merit should go.

The features of the distribution are the following:

  • System
    • OpenSUSE 11.3 – 64 bit
    • Kernel 2.6.34
    • gcc 4.5.0
    • KDE 4.4.4
  • Scientific software
    • cantor
    • enGrid 1.2.0
    • gmsh 2.4.2
    • grace
    • gsl
    • wxMaxima and Maxima
    • Octave with an almost complete selection of octave-forge packages
    • OpenFOAM(r) 1.7.x
    • Paraview 3.8.0
    • pyFoam
    • QtOctave
    • R
  • Development tools
    • DDD
    • Eclipse Helios with CDT
    • Emacs
    • git
    • kate
    • vim
  • Other software
    • Blender
    • Firefox 3.6
    • Gimp
    • ImageMagick
    • OpenOffice (go-oo edition)

Three formats are available:

  • Installable Live DVD (.iso)
    • This format allows the system to be tested and eventually installed on physical hardware or inside a virtual machine. The installation procedure is identical to the standard procedure used in openSUSE live images. Instructions on how to prepare a live DVD can be found here.
    • Download size: 1.9GB
  • USB/Hard Drive image
    • This format allows permanent images (USB/hard drive) to be created. The procedure to store the image on a USB pendrive, in order to create a booting system is illustrated here.
    • Download size: 2.2GB (compressed image in tar.gz)
    • Expanded size: 10.9GB + 1GB for swap partition
    • The image will expand during the first boot to occupy all the available space on the target disk. It is recommended to use a 16GB pendrive or a larger external hard drive to be able to safely store changes made to the system and data.
  • image
    • This format is ideal to be used in virtual environments. Instructions on how to proceed to use this format on various guest operating systems can be found here.
    • Download size: 2.2 GB (Virtual disk size: 16GB – 1GB Virtual RAM)

It is possible to build the same image so that it can be used in a XEN virtual machine, if this is of interest to some user. Please, let me know. I did not build it to save storage

How to download the images?

At the moment the images are hosted on SUSE Studio Gallery and can be downloaded only by registered users of SUSE Studio, since they are still under testing.

What are user name and password?

There are two users pre-configured in the images:

  • geeko – password: geekoPassword
  • root – password: rootPassword

Note: For security reasons, if you create a permanent image, it is strongly recommended to change both these password.

To change the password of the user “geeko”, simply open a terminal, type “passwd” and insert your new password. To change “root”‘s password, open a terminal, type “su”, insert root’s password, then type “passwd” and insert the new password for root’s account. Finally type “exit” to release the administrative rights.

Why is it called GeekoCFD?

Of course the name is inspired by Geeko, the omnipresent openSUSE chameleon, who powers the distribution and made it easy to build these images together with his friend Dister, SUSE Studio robot. ;-)

Disclaimer

Images are provided “as is”, without any form of support, and without any warranty of suitability to any purpose. Users are subject to the license of each package contained in the distribution, which is implicitly accepted when using the images. For further information, please refer to the openSUSE license and to the license of each of the packages included in the distribution.

However, even if no support is due, if you find the images useful, and you encounter a problem, any feedback is appreciated.

All trademarks belong to their respective owners. This offering is not approved or endorsed by OpenCFD Limited, the producer of the OpenFOAM software and owner of the OPENFOAM®  and OpenCFD®  trade marks.

Posted in CFD, Linux, OpenFOAM, openSUSE.

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By Alberto – September 2, 2010

OpenFOAM 1.7.1 has been released and brings new bugreporting tool

OpenCFD® announced the release of OpenFOAM® 1.7.1, which has been verified using gcc 4.5 compilers and openSUSE 11.3. Together with this version, a new bug reporting system has been made available. Users of OpenFOAM 1.7.x will receive the updates directly in the git repository, with a regular “git pull”, without any need to install the updated version explicitly.

This offering is not approved or endorsed by OpenCFD Limited, the producer of the OpenFOAM software and owner of the OPENFOAM®  and OpenCFD®  trade marks.

Posted in CFD, OpenFOAM.

Tagged with , , .

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By Alberto – August 26, 2010

Typesetting equations in your blog

Typesetting equations in a website is not always an easy task, and it would be wonderful to have the power of LaTeX available. Well, if you use WordPress to manage your blog, that’s possible, and all it takes is installing the wp-latex plugin. WordPress offers a public LaTeX server, where your equations will be generated and converted into images in the displayed web page, however, if you have a LaTeX server on your host you can use it in place of the public server.

Example? Let’s write a kinetic equation:

\frac{\partial f}{\partial t} +\textbf{v} \frac{\partial f}{\partial \textbf{x}} + \frac{\partial f}{\partial \textbf{v}} \left(\frac{\textbf{F}}{\textrm{m}_\textrm{p}} f \right) = \mathbb{C}

As you might have noticed from the presence of special fonts, support for AMS packages is provided automatically, without any specific configuration.

Posted in General.

Tagged with , , .

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By Alberto – August 22, 2010

Some comment on openSUSE 11.3

OpenSUSE 11.3 has just been released, after eight months of development. It follows openSUSE 11.2, one of the best openSUSE releases of the last years, at least in my opinion. Unfortunately openSUSE 11.3 does not seem to be at the same level. It still is a good core release, but it is not as clean as openSUSE users are used to.

First of all, it seems the release was rushed again, without preparing the last very important details: there are no official repositories for accelerated video drivers, a problem that affected also other releases in the past, disappointing users, especially the new and inexperienced ones. Someone claims this is not openSUSE fault, since the drivers are not open-source. I disagree: openSUSE is an operating system, and should provide what is needed to support user’s hardware at best. It is the job of a Linux distribution to package software and provide a complete solution to its users.

Second, a deeper look at the installed system resulting from the KDE live CD of openSUSE 11.3 shows the lack of care in packaging the medium: two additional tools to be installed in virtual machine guest systems are installed also on real hardware, originating a failure message at boot. Similarly, nscd is started with an error message due to a missing configuration file. Additionally, SSH daemon is executed automatically, which was not the case in openSUSE 11.2, without any additional information in the release notes (in the 11.2 release it was disabled for additional security).

Of course these details are not going to prevent old users from using openSUSE, however they might discourage new users, which surely are not willing to download hundreds of megabytes of kernel sources and compilers just to manually build the driver required to visualize desktop effects and 3D games, and they do not know what packages to search to remove the useless services started at boot. A clean experience is essential to attract new users and to keep the old ones, and the lack of polish of the 11.3 release does not help to realize this goal. Surely, under the cover of these small but annoying problems there is the technically sound and robust SUSE, but why should new users and potential contributors be supposed to see that? They’ll probably see an unpolished distribution, and move elsewhere. Relying only on the technical aspects, which are clearly essential, is not enough, and openSUSE cannot afford that.

The openSUSE project has been struggling in attracting contributors for a long time, many discussions were opened on this topic, and many different conclusions were drawn. I believe the major reason of not being able to do so is strictly related to the global quality of the distribution: the lack of consistency between releases, the lack of care for those small details that make user’s experience better and easier play a very important role in forming the first impression in new users, who are future contributors. A contributor wants to be part of  a project with a clear goal and a clear intention to succeed, which improves user’s experience. I do not think this is what characterizes, at the moment, the openSUSE project and its distribution, and it is surely one of the aspects on which openSUSE needs to work more.

Posted in openSUSE.

8 comments

By Alberto – July 16, 2010

OpenSUSE 11.3 has been released

The openSUSE project release the 11.3 version of openSUSE, which can be downloaded from here. The release announcement, with the details of the release can be found at this link.

Posted in openSUSE.

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By Alberto – July 16, 2010

Installing OpenFOAM 1.7 on openSUSE 11.3

The installations instructions for OpenFOAM 1.7.0 on openSUSE 11.3 are almost identical to those for openSUSE 11.2 reported here. However, one additional package is necessary. For the reader’s convenience, I report the whole procedure, highlighting in orange the differences with the installation on openSUSE 11.2.

The steps of the procedure are the following:

  • Use YaST to install
  • Create a directory called OpenFOAM in your home directory
    • mkdir ~/OpenFOAM
  • Enter the OpenFOAM directory
    • cd ~/OpenFOAM
  • Download both the OpenFOAM and ThirdParty packages from here and save them in your ~/OpenFOAM directory
  • Extract the OpenFOAM-1.7.0.gtgz package with the command: tar xzf OpenFOAM-1.7.0.gtgz
  • Extract the ThirdParty-1.7.0.gtgz package with the command: tar xzf ThirdParty-1.7.0.gtgz
  • Open your ~/.bashrc file in a text editor and add the line:
    • . $HOME/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-1.7.0/etc/bashrc

    and source your ~/.bashrc file with the command: source ~/.bashrc

  • Enter the OpenFOAM-1.7.0 directory with the command: cd $FOAM_INST_DIR/OpenFOAM-1.7.0
  • Compile OpenFOAM with the command: ./Allwmake
  • Rebuild Paraview with the following commands:
    • cd $WM_THIRD_PARTY_DIR
    • ./Allclean
    • ./makeParaView
  • Rebuild the PV3FoamReader as follows:
    • cd $FOAM_UTILITIES/postProcessing/graphicsPV3FoamReader
    • ./Allwclean
    • ./Allwmake

The native VTK reader available on the OpenFOAM Wiki can be compiled as follows:

  • Download the SVN version of the reader, required for Paraview 3.8 (you need the svn package installed):
    • svn co https://of-interfaces.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/of-interfaces/trunk/vtkPOpenFOAMReader
  • I will assume you saved it in ~/vtkPOpenFOAMReader
  • Create a directory where to build the reader. For convenience I will call it ~/vtkReader.
  • Open a terminal and enter that directory
    • cd vtkReader.
  • Type the command:
    • cmake ~/vtkPOpenFOAMReader
  • If OpenFOAM is properly configured, the build configuration will be written.
  • In the same terminal execute the commands
    • make
    • make install
  • Copy the file pvFoam in ~/vtkPOpenFOAMReader into your ~/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-1.7.0/bin directory, to be able to run paraview with pvFoam, exactly as done with paraFoam.
  • Note that both the temporary directories vtkReader and vtkPOpenFOAMReader can be removed.

Enjoy :-)

This offering is not approved or endorsed by OpenCFD Limited, the producer of the OpenFOAM software and owner of the OPENFOAM® and OpenCFD® trade marks.

Posted in CFD, OpenFOAM.

1 comment

By Alberto – June 27, 2010

Installing OpenFOAM 1.7 on openSUSE 11.2

Installing OpenFOAM® 1.7 on openSUSE 11.2 is very similar to installing OpenFOAM 1.6.x, however some differences deserve to be noticed. The steps of the procedure are the following:

  • Use YaST to install
  • Create a directory called OpenFOAM in your home directory
    • mkdir ~/OpenFOAM
  • Enter the OpenFOAM directory
    • cd ~/OpenFOAM
  • Download both the OpenFOAM and ThirdParty packages from here and save them in your ~/OpenFOAM directory
  • Extract the OpenFOAM-1.7.0.gtgz package with the command: tar xzf OpenFOAM-1.7.0.gtgz
  • Extract the ThirdParty-1.7.0.gtgz package with the command: tar xzf ThirdParty-1.7.0.gtgz
  • Open your ~/.bashrc file in a text editor and add the line:
    • . $HOME/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-1.7.0/etc/bashrc

    and source your ~/.bashrc file with the command: source ~/.bashrc

  • Enter the OpenFOAM-1.7.0 directory with the command: cd $FOAM_INST_DIR/OpenFOAM-1.7.0
  • Compile OpenFOAM with the command: ./Allwmake
  • Rebuild Paraview with the following commands:
    • cd $WM_THIRD_PARTY_DIR
    • ./Allclean
    • ./makeParaView
  • Rebuild the PV3FoamReader as follows:
    • cd $FOAM_UTILITIES/postProcessing/graphicsPV3FoamReader
    • ./Allwclean
    • ./Allwmake

This will rebuild the whole OpenFOAM and paraview, and provide you a fully working installation. However, the paraFoam does not work properly on my installation, so I compiled once again the very powerful and more flexible native reader available on the OpenFOAM wiki, which also allows easy post-processing of decomposed cases.

The instructions to compile the reader are as follows:

  • Download the SVN version of the reader, required for Paraview 3.8 (you need the svn package installed):
    • svn co https://of-interfaces.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/of-interfaces/trunk/vtkPOpenFOAMReader
  • I will assume you saved it in ~/vtkPOpenFOAMReader
  • Create a directory where to build the reader. For convenience I will call it ~/vtkReader.
  • Open a terminal and enter that directory
    • cd vtkReader.
  • Type the command:
    • ccmake ~/vtkPOpenFOAMReader
  • If OpenFOAM is properly configured, the build configuration will be written.
  • In the same terminal execute the commands
    • make
    • make install
  • Copy the file pvFoam in ~/vtkPOpenFOAMReader/BSD/ into your ~/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-1.7.0/bin directory, to be able to run paraview with pvFoam, exactly as done with paraFoam.
  • Refer to ~/vtkPOpenFOAMReader/readerPanel.pdf for details on the reader interface.
  • Note that both the temporary directories vtkReader and vtkPOpenFOAMReader can be removed.

Enjoy :-)

This offering is not approved or endorsed by OpenCFD Limited, the producer of the OpenFOAM software and owner of the OPENFOAM® and OpenCFD® trade marks.

Posted in CFD, OpenFOAM.

1 comment

By Alberto – June 27, 2010

OpenFOAM 1.7 released

OpenCFD® released OpenFOAM® 1.7, which consolidates the features of the git version OpenFOAM 1.6.x in the new release, under the GNU GPL 3 license. A summary of the new features can be found here, while more details are available in the release notes of the code. The new version can be downloaded from the web-page at this link.

Differently from the previous releases, OpenFOAM 1.7 is distributed in binary form only for Debian/Ubuntu systems, while for other Linux distributions only the source code is available. No pre-compiled, platform-independent binary package is made available. As usual, however, the code has been tested on the latest stable releases of openSUSE and Ubuntu, and compiles without difficulties on openSUSE 11.2.

This offering is not approved or endorsed by OpenCFD Limited, the producer of the OpenFOAM software and owner of the OPENFOAM® and OpenCFD® trade marks.

Posted in CFD, OpenFOAM.

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By Alberto – June 27, 2010

Installing Skype on openSUSE 11.3 – 64 bit

The openSUSE project is going to release openSUSE 11.3 very soon, and, as usual, some additional work is necessary to make Skype work on the 64 bit version, since the original package for openSUSE 11+ is compiled only for 32-bit systems. These instructions are not necessary on 32-bit systems.

Before installing the Skype RPM you find on Skype website, you have to install the following packages, if not already present on your system:

  • libasound2-32bit
  • xorg-x11-libXv-32bit
  • xorg-x11-libs-32bit
  • libqt4-32bit
  • libqt4-x11-32bit
  • libpng12-0-32bit

These packages were not installed by default on my system after performing a clean installation of openSUSE 11.3 from the KDE live-CD. It is possible they are already present in other configurations.

Enjoy! :-)

Posted in Linux, openSUSE.

5 comments

By Alberto – June 27, 2010

Des Moines best city where to raise a family

Good news for Iowa! Forbes named Des Moines (Iowa) the best city where to raise a family in USA, thanks to good schools, affordable housing, safety, short time required to go from home to work, and community.

Posted in General.

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By Alberto – June 10, 2010