Thanks hansel, that sounds hopefull! After days (and nights) of reinstall Ubuntu and OpenFoam, I will try this last way!

One stupid question:
You are using Paraview 3.3. Do you know the way to get a working PV3.4-Installation including working paraFoam?

Thank for your longsome work
ff23

I'm using the 3.3-cvs version that came with the openfoam stuff. I was so happy to get that working, I was afraid to try anything else. :-)

Hi!

Thanks for this tutorial, I think I managed to get my OF setup pretty much working, despite a few errors during compilation. The OF-1.5 compilation will stop after some errors, just as you mentioned. Paraview compiled just fine, but I have a problem when I run paraFoam. I get the error message:

(home dir)/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-1.5/bin/paraFoam: 103: paraview: not found

when trying to run a case file. I haven't installed paraview via a debian package, instead it now sits compiled in the ThirdParty/ParaView.. folder. Any ideas how to make paraFoam see paraview?


Regards,

- pm

The first thing I'd check is make sure that the ThirdParty/ParaView folder is in your path.

Hi,


thanks for the fast response!

The /bin is in the path, where the pv(*)server executables are also. I did try to symlink the .pvserver as 'paraview' in OpenFOAM /bin folder, which did something but didn't run the case file - I guess that's not the way to go either.

I omitted the last step in your how-to about compiling PV3FoamReader, because that resulted in an error and I noticed I had the paraFoam executable as a result of OF compilation. Maybe the problem is because of this (some script didn't run) ?

In my build paraview got put in the OpenFOAM/ThirdParty/Paraview3.3-cvs/platforms/linux64Gcc/bin directory. Find the paraview file and see if it really can execute.

Did you add the lines that have to do with Paraview to your .bashrc file (step 10) Remember to sub in your location for OpenFOAM.

There are 3 components to this viewer system:

1) paraview - the main program for doing the graphical display.

2) FoamReader - this is a library (I think) that paraview loads, that lets it understand the openfoam file formats.

3) paraFoam - this is a script, that does a little preparation of your case directory and then starts paraview with the options to use the FoamReader library.

If you are going to use paraFoam you need to compile the foamreader.

Steve

There is a slightly less comprehensive guide to a OpenFOAM installation on Ubuntu on http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=156298. It seems to be maintained as new versions are released. At least this worked for me.

(Though, I'm having severe problems with the PV3 readerplugin :P )

Hi,

I went around the whole compilation stuff and simply downloaded the 64 bit binary of Paraview which runs Ok. However, its OpenFOAM reader seems to be broken - it just crashes the whole Paraview when trying to open a case file. Apparently this is a common problem.

I thought I'd look into compiling the PV3FoamReader, if that'd fix this, but this in turn lead to another error.. :

[compilation stuff here..]
CMake Error at /home/pamakela/OpenFOAM/ThirdParty/ParaView3.3-cvs/platforms/linux64Gcc/VTK/VTKConfig.cmake:158 (INCLUDE):
include could not find load file:

/home/pamakela/OpenFOAM/ThirdParty/ParaView3.3-cvs/platforms/linux64Gcc/VTK/VTKConfigQt.cmake



I'm wondering if there's a (64 bit) binary version of PV3FoamReader to simply download? The binary PV was version 3.4.0.

So you download the 64bit version of Paraview from their website? I thought the directory structure was different ... can you get the paraView to open using paraFoam from case dir?

Yes I copied the 64 bit version bluntly to the dir structure where the original paraview executable should've been.

When I run 'paraFoam -case $FOAM_RUN/tutorials/icoFoam/cavity', paraview 3.4.0 opens and a dialog pops up, where you can select a reader for the case file. After selecting 'OpenFOAM files' reader, whole paraview dies. There is a patch to fix this, but that route means compiling paraview itself, which resulted in issues with my Jaunty package setup (synaptic won't install necessary dependencies).

I'd really prefer some binary PV3FoamReader if there is one to try with.

(For the record: this is a very fresh jaunty install with all updates applied)

Well, I compiled both paraView and PV3 reader plugin in 64bit Jaunty two days ago. In a sense this works - the reader dialog does not appear - but opening a geometry has never worked in any way on my computer, and I don't know the reason for that. What dependencies isn't working? Have you installed the build-essentials?

Actually I tried to remedy my compilation issues by installing (to make sure) a big bunch of Qt4 packages, but they won't install because there's some dependency mismatch. So in other words, I don't know exactly what those packages are :)

Build-essentials is and was there. Are you saying the build-essentials is all you would need to compile PV3FoamReader succesfully?

I did the buildParafoam script first, and that one checks if the dependencies are ok and gives feedback on which it needs. The only thing I remember editing was commenting out the Qt error message (given you have version >4.3).

When compiling CVS snapshot from paraview, I also had to disable one or two paraview plugins in the cmake textfiles in the directory tree - I think it was one called pointSprite which failed continuously. So that is solved by just choosing 'OFF' in the dir tree. That being said, paraFoam/paraView has not worked on either of my Ubuntu installations so far :p

Ok, I got past the previous PV3FoamReader issue.

But now this:

[ 9%] Generating qrc_PV3FoamReader.cxx
[ 18%] Generating moc_PV3FoamReaderPluginImplementation.cxx
Scanning dependencies of target PV3FoamReader
[ 27%] Building CXX object CMakeFiles/PV3FoamReader.dir/moc_PV3FoamReaderPluginImplementation.o
[ 36%] Building CXX object CMakeFiles/PV3FoamReader.dir/PV3FoamReaderPluginImplementation.o
[ 45%] Building CXX object CMakeFiles/PV3FoamReader.dir/qrc_PV3FoamReader.o
Linking CXX shared library /home/pamakela/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-1.5/lib/linux64GccDPOpt/libPV3FoamReader.so
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lpqComponents
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[2]: *** [/home/pamakela/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-1.5/lib/linux64GccDPOpt/libPV3FoamReader.so] Error 1
make[1]: *** [CMakeFiles/PV3FoamReader.dir/all] Error 2
make: *** [all] Error 2


ld can't see this 'pqComponents'. I added the pqComponents.dir into LD_LIBRARY_PATH but of course it didn't work. Any ideas for this?

(open source seems to be quite free in terms of money. What about in terms of time?)

There is a brief guide to the paraView compilation in the bundled openFoam readme, I think it's in section 7. After successfully having compiled the paraView, I didn't experience any problems compiling the PV3 reader. Did you use the ./Allwclean first? (Though I don't know if this would help in this case). I remember I got one of these "ld" errors, but I didn't do any fancy tricks to get this work like adding paths or anything - I think I just added libraries (which for the most happend during the paraView compilation itself).

I now did a clean compilation with the proper Qt/VTK packages and all went Ok now. This of course reverts me from the binary Paraview 3.4 to 3.3, but running the 'paraFoam -case $FOAM_RUN/tutorials/icoFoam/cavity' works now.

The solution in my case was to remove some packages which prevented the installation of the right Qt packages. It seems the method described in the beginning of this thread is indeed a valid one, but maybe the required packages list part could be more informative.

Hi all, dear Hansel

Thank you very much for your detailed tutorial to install OpenFOAM on this version of Ubuntu (mine is 32 bits). I run the ‘foamInstallationTest’ script and there was no mistake. Does this mean everyting is all right?

I'm very new user of ubuntu (and OpenFOAM of course).

Thanks a lot!!!

hi,

once the foamtestInstallation does not give any errors it means ur installation is OK. Trying running some of the examples given in the tutorials

Are you sure there is an error? I don't see one in the lines you posted and I can't find the string 'rror;' in the full file. What line or words trouble you?

Hi hansel, are you refering to my post?

hi,

Thanks for you answer yapalparvi. Even I had no errors thanks to this wonderful guide, when i run some of the examples given in the tutorials, i found some problems in paraview, as you can see explained in the next post: http://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/ope...tml#post223205

If somebody could help me with this...

Thank you very much!!