Open Source, Linux, Visit, Code-Saturne,openFOAM..

Ahmed

There is a number of open source codes that are freely available for the CFD practitioners and other scientists too.

The common thread between all these programmes is that they have been developed on the Linux operating system.

The question that jumps before my eyes is this:-

is the linux O/S a unique O/S (in the sense that Windows is only Windows or Unix is only Unix) or it is just that the Linux banner is very wide and open.

Take any project on the sourceforge net and try to download it, no matter what your chosen programme is, you will find One and only one msi (micro soft installer) file besides a good number of files for the Linux installers.

To explain what I want to say by this public post, Let us take one concrete example, the visualization programme Visit, developed by a research laboratory (google for the details) and is freely available for download, you log on the web site,then the download page, and voila There is a number of binary precompiled files for different arch/Linux systems (ask your self again if there is only one Linux operating system) then you have the very intelligent build_visit script. Since none of the precompiled binaries were suitable for my openSUSE intel arch, I downloaded that intelligent script, and in about 85 minutes I had visit 1.10 running on my computer.

Is the reason of me calling this script "Intelligent solution" clear to you, the reader, now.

Take the other codes mentioned in the head line, they are freely available for download, BUT, you need a number of freely avaiable external libraries with a specific version number, newer versions of these libraries are not guaranteed to produce a running code.

My simple question is this: Why the developers of these codes can not develop a similar build script, in the worst case, they can copy the build_visit script and modify it to suit their particular libraries needs.

Of course I am angry, you spend time chasing these dependencies and end up with a number of error messages just because one library or more is/are newer than the ones used by the developers. You, the reader of this post, can make the change, just express your opinion, few lines on this public forum will be heard by those developers. Happy Computing to all

So far, the solution to such noise, that I have followed was the use of the caelinux distro