Doc:Installing Salome-Meca-2008.1

Installing Salome-Meca 2008.1 GPL on

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron)

Get the software

Download it: Find it from the CAELinux web site, or use Google/Yahoo/whatever to find it. If you're reading this page you probably know where to find it...

At the time of writing this, the tarball was to be found here: Salome-Meca-2008.1-GPL

You can get it using "wget" as follows. In a terminal, type:

wget ftp://cae-linux:salome@caelinux.dyndns.org/packages/salome-meca-2008.1/SALOME-MECA-2008.1-GPL.tgz

It's about a 360 MB download (SALOME-MECA-2007.1-GPL.tgz was 700 MB)

Install

All of the following commands are typed, i.e., use a terminal.

"cd" to the directory where you saved the tarball and unpack it:

tar -xvvf SALOME-MECA-2008.1-GPL.tgz

Move it to the /opt directory:

sudo mv SALOME-MECA-2008.1-GPL /opt/

Run the post install script:

cd /opt/SALOME-MECA-2008.1-GPL/postinstall/
sudo ./postinstall.py

Change the file/dir ownership (not crucial):

sudo chown -R root:root /opt/SALOME-MECA-2008.1-GPL

Create symbolic links

This will enable you to run Salome-Meca from any location.

cd /usr/local/bin
sudo ln -s /opt/SALOME-MECA-2008.1-GPL/runSalomeMeca runSalomeMeca
sudo ln -s /opt/SALOME-MECA-2008.1-GPL/killSalome killSalome
cd

Everything should be OK now.

Run (launch) Salome-Meca

Still in a terminal, type

runSalomeMeca 

This will launch Salome-Meca. You can stop/end (kill) the application with

killSalome

Troubleshooting

Should you get the following error if you try to run Salome-Meca

"Failed to narrow the root naming context"

then check your "/etc/hosts" file. It will look something like this:

# Do not remove the following line, or various programs
# that require network functionality will fail.
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost localhost
::1 localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6 

The second "localhost" should be your "hostname", for example:

127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost your_host_name

If you don't know what your hostname is, type:

hostname

If you're installing on 64-bit machine, remember to install 32-bit libraries, i.e:

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

otherwise Salome-Meca won't run.

Post install tweaks (Ubuntu 8.04)

These are from posts on the CAELinux's public forums (which is a good place to look for issues in general).

Uncheck interactive Aster runs

On my installation Aster wouldn't solve if "Interactive Follow-Up" was checked. In Salome-Meca, activate the "Aster" module and navigate to

File

Preferences...

Choose Aster on the left, and un-check the option on the right.

Also, while you're at it, you might want to change the editor to "gedit" (GNOME desktops) or "kate" (for KDE desktops) or any editor of your choice if it's empty.

Fonts

You'll notice that the GUI font changes to a horrible looking typewriter font if you kill and run Salome-Meca again, fix it as follows

First, remove the existing link:

sudo rm /opt/SALOME-MECA-2008.1-GPL/SALOME/SALOME3/prerequis/debianForSalome-v1_2_0/lib/libfontconfig.so.1

Then (32-bit):

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libfontconfig.so.1.3.0 \
/opt/SALOME-MECA-2008.1-GPL/SALOME/SALOME3/prerequis/debianForSalome-v1_2_0/lib/libfontconfig.so.1

64-bit:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib32/libfontconfig.so.1.3.0 \
/opt/SALOME-MECA-2008.1-GPL/SALOME/SALOME3/prerequis/debianForSalome-v1_2_0/lib/libfontconfig.so.1

Create an application launcher

Right click on the top bar, select

Add to panel...

Custom Application Launcher

Click "Add", fill in as shown below and click "OK":

The Salome Logo

One I 'hacked' using GIMP. Get it here:

---

William Hunter

If you have suggestions or find errors, please e-mail me: