[zeliboba]

I'm thinking about making a package (rpm, deb, ebuild) for freefoam (fork of openfoam with better building system). it is interesting what would be more useful for community. please choose linux distribution(s) where you use or would like to install openfoam. multiple choice is possible! by "use" I do not necessarly mean "compile", since you can also use binary build or your administrator did it for you. if your distribution is not mentioned or it is "other", please leave a comment in the thread. actually, any comments are welcome!

[akidess]

I voted Ubuntu where I do the postprocessing, but I actually use OpenFOAM on a cluster with scientific linux 5.3 (RHEL based).

[vital303]

I voted Ubuntu. But it would be nice to see open(free)foam in gentoo because of Gentoo Prefix http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/prefix/ It allows to unroll a convenient package system in unprivileged environment (without root access on the system).

[alberto]

Originally Posted by zeliboba

I'm thinking about making a package (rpm, deb, ebuild) for freefoam (fork of openfoam with better building system). it is interesting what would be more useful for community. please choose a linux distribution where you use or would like to install openfoam. by "use" I do not necessarly mean "compile", since you can also use binary build or your administrator did it for you. if your distribution is not mentioned or it is "other", please leave a comment in the thread. actually, any comments are welcome!

Hello! Great idea.

I have two comments:

1. Two main distributions are missing: Red Hat Linux Enterprise and SUSE Linux Enterprise. I don't know it this is intended or not, just wanted to point it out.
2. Have you considered to use openSUSE buildservice to create these packages? You can build there for all the distributions you cited, debian/ubuntu included. The service is free, and packages would be hosted permanently on higly available servers, of course at no cost. You can take a look at https://build.opensuse.org/ Supported distributions are: openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, Mandriva, Debian, Ubuntu, and it is possible to build against all of them with a single configuration file (well, 2 if building against debian/ubuntu too).
   I was considering to do something similar myself, since it would make live images creation much easier, so if you are interested, please tell me.

Best,
Alberto

[zeliboba]

Originally Posted by alberto

1. Two main distributions are missing: Red Hat Linux Enterprise and SUSE Linux Enterprise. I don't know it this is intended or not, just wanted to point it out.
2. Have you considered to use openSUSE buildservice to create these packages? You can build there for all the distributions you cited, debian/ubuntu included. The service is free, and packages would be hosted permanently on higly available servers, of course at no cost. You can take a look at https://build.opensuse.org/

1. actually I took top-ranked distributions from distrowatch and left some fields for "others". of course rank on http://distrowatch.com/ does not represent popularity in scientific/industrial community, but at least something
2. thanks a lot for the hint! it is really useful.

[alberto]

Originally Posted by zeliboba

1. actually I took top-ranked distributions from distrowatch and left some fields for "others". of course rank on http://distrowatch.com/ does not represent popularity in scientific/industrial community, but at least something
2. thanks a lot for the hint! it is really useful.

You're welcome! Don't hesistate to poke me if you have questions about the build service.
There is some effort starting to create a set of packages and a distribution for scientific applications based on openSUSE, as the openSUSE community already did for educational applications. It is still "work in progress". I'm pushing to do that, and I will take care of a part of the project myself, so if you want to join, you're surely welcome

Best,
Alberto

[zeliboba]

there is a message here I've posted almost one year ago with statistics on OF forum. I was just curious is there something new? nothing:

Forum                                                             Threads  Posts
OpenFOAM Installation                                   727         5413
OpenFOAM Meshing / Mesh Conversion        642         4111
OpenFOAM Pre-Processing / FoamX              364         1739
OpenFOAM Running / Solving / CFD               3547       20212
OpenFOAM Post-Processing                           550         3268
OpenFOAM Programming and Development   103         353
OpenFOAM Other                                            424         2119

installation issues persistently take the second place after usage. more verbose: the installation of the CFD software is raising more questions then pre- or post-processing.

hallo, people! do you think it is normal?! maybe it is better to resolve this issue, instead of writing cookbooks, then patches to cookbook, then patches to the patches?..

[andy_]

Interesting poll which I guess reflects the kind of people using OpenFOAM (or perhaps just those that respond to polls like this). As someone mentioned earlier, I would expect RHEL/Centos/ScientificLinux (all effectively the same thing) to be by far the most dominant version of Linux on scientific computers.

What proportion of people use OpenFoam on local desktop type machines and what proportion on server type clusters? If the former is dominant then perhaps that would explain the preference for Ubuntu.