I have recently seen Home, a film about our planet and what is happening with climate change. I think it is worth to share, since it is very beautiful, independently of what our ideas on climate change are. You can also visit the YouTube channel, with additional videos and information.
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Decision taken: openSUSE defaults to KDE
The openSUSE management took the decision of pre-selecting KDE as default desktop environment. This will be done by pre-selecting the KDE radio button in the current desktop selection screen, presented to the user at installation time. What does this mean? Nothing, for many users absolutely nothing. If a user will click “next” in the selection screen, KDE will be installed by default, but it will be possible to select GNOME with a simple click. The only thing this long and frustrating discussion showed are the old tensions in the community about a question that should have been considered as resolved long ago, in the interest of the community itself. Old…
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Book on rarefied gases and kinetic theory
If you need to an accessible and at the same time rigorous book on the kinetic theory of rarefied gases, with an in-depth discussion on classical and modern methods to derive macroscopic equations from the Boltzmann equation, you should probably read Henning Struchtrup book Macroscopic Transport Equations for Rarefied Gas Flows, published by Springer, and also available in electronic format. The book also targets non-experts of the topic, with an introduction to the basics of the kinetic theory, the derivation of the Boltzmann equation, an explanation of the Chapman-Enskog and Grad’s methods, the regularized Grad equations, to conclude with the order of magnitude approach and the study of the stability…
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Novell Moonlight 2.0 beta available
Miguel de Icaza just announced on his blog the availability of Moonlight 2.0 beta. Moonlight is an implementation of Microsoft Silverlight, which works on Linux, and can be installed as a Firefox extension using this link. Users are invited to test it against Silverlight website and report problems to the developers.
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Installing OpenFOAM 1.6.x and keeping it up to date
OpenCFDTM regularly releases updates for OpenFOAMTM using a GIT repository, which can be conveniently used both for a fresh installation and to keep your current OpenFOAM installation up to date. First installation Create a directory called OpenFOAM in your home directory: mkdir ~/OpenFOAM Enter the OpenFOAM directory: cd ~/OpenFOAM Download the OpenFOAM sources from the GIT repository: git clone git://repo.or.cz/OpenFOAM-1.6.x.git Download the third party packages from the OpenCFD website. If you are using a 64-bit system, you need to download also the 32-bit version of the third party package, containing cmake. Extract the third party packages corresponding to your architecture (32 or 64 bit) in the ~/OpenFOAM directory. If you…
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OpenSUSE: doing it wrong again!
A very long discussion on making KDE the default desktop in openSUSE is taking place, digging out a problem that probably many of us considered resolved, but clearly was not. Many KDE users and developers feel KDE should be the default desktop for openSUSE, because the majority of openSUSE users, according to a survey conducted last year, choose KDE (GNOME has a user share slightly higher than 27%). The proposal, after a long discussion is to Pre-select the button of KDE, keeping the alphabetical order of the desktop environments, so that a user who clicks “Next” during the installation process automatically selects KDE Make a formal statement that GNOME is…
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SUSE Studio 1.0 is ready
SUSE Studio, developed by Nat Friedman and the SUSE Studio team at Novell, has been launched. With SUSE Studio it is possible to easily build a customized version of openSUSE, adding software from the openSUSE buildservice repository and personalized RPM’s. The system is completely configured through a very friendly web interface, which allow the image to be fully customized, from the look to system files and services. If you want to see an example of what can be done with SUSE Studio, you can take a look at the slides I prepared to describe the creation of a live image for fluid dynamics applications. Geeko seems to be in a…
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OpenCFD releases OpenFOAM 1.6
OpenCFD announced today the release of OpenFOAMTM 1.6, which a rich set of new features. The full list of new features and changes can be found in the release notes, while the code can be downloaded from the official website here. Among the new functionalities: New structure in the turbulence (RANS and LES) models New wall functions for both RANS and LES models. Thermophysical model to allow non-gaseous materials to be defined. Generalized polynomial equation of state. Finite volume discrete ordinate method for radiation modelling. Discrete Simulation Monte Carlo solver. Polynomial fit higher order schemes. Coal combustion model in Lagrangian solvers. Steady state and transient solvers for heat transfer. Reacting…
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OpenFOAM Live USB with SUSE Studio
I have recently prepared an OpenFOAM(r) Live USB image using SUSE Studio to try Studio functionalites, and I was really impressed by the ease of use, the clean interface and its capabilities. You find a detailed description of what I did in the slides I prepared. In the slides you will see how to build a personalized version of openSUSE, add OpenFOAM to it and complete the system with some CFD tools like NETGEN and enGrid. In the end, the system is tested in real time on SUSE Studio servers. The compressed image (64 bit only at the moment) can be downloaded from here. After expanding it, you can write…
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Compiling PETSc on openSUSE 11.1
PETSc is a library for parallel computations that allows easy and transparent creation of both serial and parallel codes. It is based on BLAS, Lapack and MPI. To build the library on openSUSE 11.1, without relying on locally compiled BLAS, Lapack and MPI, but using the system libraries does require some additional settings, due to the missing configuration in the openmpi RPM’s. The steps to compile a local, per-user version of PETSc are the following: Add the Science repository to obtain the latest version of openmpi with the command (a previous version of openmpi is also available in the standard OSS repository, and the procedure to build PETSc against it…