[niX1337]

Hi all,

I would like to install OpenFOAM 2.3.0 / 2.3.x on my RHEL 5.8 Workstation. As I do not have root access I cannot install the necessary packages as suggested here.

Is there a workaround for non-root users on RHEL 5.8? I found a precompiled CentOS version of OF 2.2.x (centFOAM) but this one is also not working on my system (my system gcc is 4.1.2) and I would need OF 2.3.x or at least 2.3.0 anyway.

Best Regards
Nicolas

[wyldckat]

Greetings Nicolas,

It's really hard to create instructions for building OpenFOAM from source code without root permissions, because it really depends on which packages are already installed the system you're using.

Honestly, beyond CentFOAM, there are 3 other sort-of simple ways for you to do this:

1. Ask nicely your system's administrator to install the essential packages for building OpenFOAM and ParaView from source code.
2. Or install RHEL 5.8 or CentOS 5.8 in a virtual machine and then copy the installation from the virtual machine to the real machine. It's essentially what CentFOAM does. Example: http://openfoamwiki.net/index.php/Ho..._VMware_Player
3. Try following the installation instructions in the wiki and ignore the first steps that need root permissions. Let us know what errors you find and we can try helping from there.

Best regards,
Bruno

[niX1337]

Hello Bruno,

thank you for your answer!

The first option is unfortunately not possible in my case.

The second option sounds good to me. But I do not yet understand how to copy the packages that are installed by the package manager in the virtual machine. Do I just have to browse to the system directories in the virtual machine, copy all necesssary folders, put them in e.g. "./OpenFOAM/tools" on my native RHEL 5.8 and then load all the excecutables into the environment? Mabye this question sounds a little silly, but I do not have a very strong linux background...

I will save the last option in case option two fails.

Thanks for your help!

Best Regards,
Nicolas

[niX1337]

Hello Bruno,

in the meantime I started to compile OF 2.3.x without root permission. I followed your advice and skipped the first steps of the installation instructions in the wiki for CentOS 5.10.

Out of the list of necessary packages, these were already installed on my workstation:

• Development Tools
• zlib-devel
• readline
• texinfo
• libXext-devel
• libXt-devel

As openmpi was missing, I compiled it from source and loaded it into the environment. "mpirun --version" gives:

mpirun (Open MPI) 1.4

Report bugs to http://www.open-mpi.org/community/help/

I was able to bulid CMake, GCC and CGAL as explained in the installation instructions. But as soon as I try to bulid OpenFOAM, the compilation fails.

In the logfile the first entry is:

flex wmkdep.l.l
flex: fatal internal error, exec failed
make: *** [/net/capc187/fs1/proj/openfoam-1/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-2.3.x/wmake/platforms/linux64Gcc48/wmkdep] Broken pipe

This error is followed by several other errors, which sound like this:

...
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status
...

You can find a closer description in the attached logfile.

I also followed the second way you propsed and set up centOS 5.8 in a virtual machine. On the fresh OS I reproduced the situation as it is on my RHEL 5.8 workstation. That means I only installed the above listened packages before I started the installation instructions for OpenFOAM. Surprisingly I could compile OF without any problems here.

Could the first error at the beginning of logfile have somesthing to do with my flex version? "flex --version" shows "2.5.35" for RHEL 5.8 and "2.5.4" in the VM.

Any further suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Best regards,
Nicolas

[wyldckat]

Hi Nicolas,

I've finally managed to look into this, but haven't managed to do the necessary tests to reproduce the same error .

Let's see:

• Regarding the transfer of the installation from the virtual machine, in theory you can create a massive tarball of the whole OpenFOAM folder from the virtual machine and then unpack it in the relative location at your workstation.
  • The relative location I'm referring to is "$HOME", indicated by this command:
    

    echo $HOME

  • For example, to pack:
    

    cd $HOME
    cd OpenFOAM
    tar -czf OpenFOAM-2.3.1-full.tar.gz OpenFOAM-2.3.1
    tar -czf ThirdParty-2.3.1-full.tar.gz ThirdParty-2.3.1

  • To unpack:
    

    cd $HOME
    mkdir OpenFOAM
    cd OpenFOAM
    tar -xzf OpenFOAM-2.3.1-full.tar.gz
    tar -xzf ThirdParty-2.3.1-full.tar.gz

• Forgot to tell you that you didn't need to manually compile Open-MPI 1.4, since you can simply remove the option "SYSTEMOPENMPI" from the instructions and it will by default build its own Open-MPI, which is in the "ThirdParty-*" folder.
• In the virtual machine with CentOS 5.8, if you ran this command:
  

  yum upgrade

  then you now have CentOS 5.11 and not 5.8. Check the contents of the file "/etc/redhat-release" to confirm this.
• The error messages you have gotten in the log file seem to hint that something went wrong somewhere during the build process of GCC or "binutils". My guess is that most of the OpenFOAM source code got built with the system's GCC (4.1.2 I think) and then in a second pass it used GCC 4.8.1.

My advice would be to:

1. In the workstation, try following these instructions to the letter, i.e. install OpenFOAM 2.3.1: http://openfoamwiki.net/index.php/In...EL#CentOS_5.10 - at least for testing if things work out correctly. Keep in mind that every single line of code is important and that each log file is also important.
   I myself have failed sometimes to run some occasional lines of code from those wiki pages, which results in not having things working exactly as they should.
2. In the virtual machine, if you ran "yum upgrade", then I suggest that you start another new virtual machine with CentOS 5.8. Sorry about that, but upgrading is important, but in this case, it can lead to differences that are simply too big.

Beyond this, I do have plans to write a more detailed DIY installation of OpenFOAM for any scenario, but haven't managed to get enough time and inspiration to do it all...


Best regards,
Bruno

[niX1337]

Hi Bruno,

thank you for your advice.

In terms of the RHEL 5.8 virtual machine, I did not do any updates and could thus create the archives and transfer them to my workstation. But so far I did not yet test whether they work in the new environment.

As I will have to do the same procedure on a cluster (also without admin access and with a different OS) my focus is still on the direct compilation on my workstation. I found out that the different versions of flex were indeed the reason for the mentioned error. There was a bug in this specific version. As soon as I compiled flex 2.5.39 from source, I was able to build a large part of the OF excecutables without errors. But there are still some new errors which are all related to mesh utilities (see attached log file):

...
lnInclude/CGALTriangulation3DKernel.H:36:43: fatal error: CGAL/Delaunay_triangulation_3.h: No such file or directory
...

My first guess is that it must have something to do with missing packages (those I could not install as a normal user). The log files of all ThirdParty apps do not show any problem (also CGAL was built successfully). Is there an easy way to get rid of this error?

Again thank you a lot for your kind help!

Best regards,
Nicolas

[wyldckat]

Hi Nicolas,

About CGAL: cmake wasn't built with success or something happened that led it to not be seen on the command line:

./makeCGAL: line 265: cmake: command not found

Pay close attention to the details in step #10, namely the one related to building cmake: http://openfoamwiki.net/index.php/In...EL#CentOS_5.10

Best regards,
Bruno

[niX1337]

Hello Bruno,

my bad, I have no idea why it did not work for OF 2.3.1 ... but it worked perfectly with OF 2.3.x. That's why I guess I made a mistake during the 2.3.1 compilation.

To summarize for those who need to install OpenFOAM without admin rights:

• Skip the root commands in the instructions.
• Whenever an error occurs, start with the log file, go into the make files and try to find out which package could have caused the issue. For me it was a buggy flex version.
• Compile the neccessary package on your own and load the excecutables into the environment (make sure you add the path on the beginning of $PATH).
• Retry the compilation process.

As paraview requires too many packages that are missing on my workstation, I simply installed the binary version from the paraview website. To link paraview with OpenFOAM, I use the "paraFoam -bulitin" option. Only the $Paraview_DIR variable needs to be edited.

Bruno, thanks again for your kind help!

Best regards,
Nicolas