[Gallienus]

Running ParaFoam 5.6.0 64-bit under Xubuntu 18.04-64 bit. Xubuntu uses the XFCE desktop rather than the more fully featured Gnome desktop of regular Ubuntu.

ParaFoam 5.6.0 was installed as part of the OpenFoam7 distribution. I'm using the dev version as the regular version of OpenFoam 7 would not run. ParaFoam ran once using the "paraFoam &" command. Then I tried to set aliases for it by creating a
.bash_aliases file,however after run problems I commented out all the aliases.

From then paraFoam gives the follow error upon run.

FATAL ERROR: The official reader module for OpenFOAM data does not exist on
your system. This means that the version of ParaView you are using was not
compiled with OpenFOAM, or distributed with a packaged version of OpenFOAM.

For information on packaged versions of OpenFOAM/ParaView and compilation of
OpenFOAM/ParaView, see https://openfoam.org/download

Alternatively, you might be able to view your OpenFOAM data with the reader
module provided with ParaView by running:
paraFoam -builtin

There was already a cavity.OpenFOAM file in my $FOAM_RUN/cavity directory. Also following a thread seen here on this issue I installed manually the .deb package:
http://dl.openfoam.org/ubuntu/dists/.../binary-amd64/

The package aparently uninstalled ParaView (or Foam) 5.6.0 and then reinstalled it. The error persists. However, typing the " paraFoam -builtin" gets it to run and it loads the OF files from Tutorial 2.1 (Backwards facing step).

I belileve I can also run paraView and this is the same as paraFoam tho the paraFoam version may read a script somewhere to make it more specific to openFOAM.

I've 2 questions.
1) How do I get the paraFoam to run with the official openFOAM reader module?
2) Also if I run paraView with a file: "anyname.foam" in my case directory, what extra steps do I need [if any] to make paraView have complete paraFoam functionality?

[HPE]

- ParaView is a pain for OpenFOAM in general (to my observation).
1) Don't know, yet in the worst case, you may consider to change to another variant.
2) Nothing else. Just execute `paraview`, and then open that `*.foam` file within it. That's all `paraFoam` can offer, anyways.

[Gallienus]

Originally Posted by HPE

- ParaView is a pain for OpenFOAM in general (to my observation).
2) Nothing else. Just execute `paraview`, and then open that `*.foam` file within it. That's all `paraFoam` can offer, anyways.

Thanks, I can get it to run with the "paraFoam -builtin &" or by just typing paraView. Didn't know if there were any special switches that came with the Foam instead of the View versions?

ParaView seems pretty nice and well featured tho. Still learning how to use it.