Dear Henry and friends I've
 

Dear Henry and friends

I've just installed OpenFOAM 1.4.1 (AMD64) on a freshly installed OpenSUSE 10.3 x86_64 system. I have some questions about proper FoamX setup:

1. By default OpenSUSE installs with newer Sun 1.5 JRE not SDK. Would JRE be sufficient or are any additional modules from the SDK necessary?

2. What would be better? Use native packages from OS or older Java SDK provided with OpenFOAM? And what about gcc? OpenSUSE has a slightly newer 4.2.x ...

3. In installation README (/home/<user>/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-1.4.1/README),
App. A "Network Settings" the following passage quotes:
"If the user is connected to a network that uses dynamic IP addresses, they must be particularly careful to ensure that an entry for their
hostname/IP exists in the /etc/hosts file. If the server frequently reallocates IP addresses across the network, it is advisable that the
/etc/hosts file is updated automatically when any changes occur"...
My machine is part of a small peer newtwork with a couple of Windows boxes where all are connected to a DSL router/switch that automatically allocates IP addresses from its available range to every box (acts as DHCP server). SUSE resolves this dynamic IP allocation by allocating the hostname with IP address 127.0.0.2 in /etc/hosts. But without the actual IP address as allocated by the router, FoamX will not start...Besides editing /etc/hosts by hand every time, how can I fix this? (please excuse me if answer seems obvious...I am lacking
experience...)

4. When FoamX starts it issues a couple of warning messages, namely:
"...Using jar /home/george/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-1.4.1/applications/utilities/preProcessing/FoamX/ lib/FoamX.jar
Using jar /home/george/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-1.4.1/applications/utilities/preProcessing/FoamX/ lib/jlfgr-1_0.jar
libxcb: WARNING! Program tries to unlock a connection without having acquired
a lock first, which indicates a programming error.
There will be no further warnings about this issue.
libxcb: WARNING! Program tries to lock an already locked connection,
which indicates a programming error.
There will be no further warnings about this issue."
What is this? Is it serious? Is it fixable?

5. The setting "FoamX.Browser" should be "firefox" or "konqueror" in SUSE for the documentation links in FoamX to work, correct?

6. Please add a filelist with needed libs for OpenFOAM to work. I had some trouble with FoamX until I found out that I needed libelf (it's not installed by default...)


Many thanks in advance
Please accept my apologies if answers seem too obvious. I beg for your patience...

Best Regards
GK