Installing Salome-Meca 2009 on OpenSUSE 11.1

Salome^® is a very powerful open source  integrated platform for numerical simulations, including an advanced computational code, called Code Aster^®. My interest in Salome is due to its geometry generation capabilities, because it integrates a versatile CAD and a mesher, with automatic generation of hexahedral and tetrahedral meshes. The geometry generation is very useful also to create .stl files to use with tools like OpenFOAM^® snappyHexMesh automatic mesh generator.

Installing Salome from sources might be challenging, and packaging it for a specific distribution represents a lot of work. However, an alternative and easier way to install Salome on a Linux system is represented by the self-contained package Salome-Meca, which can be downloaded and promptly installed following these simple instructions, written for a local, per-user installation:

• Download the Salome-Meca package from this webpage. Before proceeding with the download, you might want to check if newer versions of the package are available here.
• Extract the content of the package using the command: tar xzf SALOME-MECA-2009.1-GPL.tgz
• Move the directory SALOME-MECA-2009.1-GPL generated during the extraction process in your ~/bin directory.
• Open your ~/.bashrc file using a text editor.
• Add the following lines, replacing <your_user_name> with your actual Linux username:
  • PATH=/home/<your_user_name>/bin/SALOME-MECA-2009.1-GPL:$PATH
  • export PATH

At this point, simply open a terminal, and type runSalomeMeca. Remember that to close Salome, you have to exit its graphical user interphace, and then press Ctrl-D to close the python interpreter which is automatically launched when Salome is executed.

Enjoy! 😀