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12th October 2016

OpenFOAM-dev & Scotch 6 | Ubuntu

Ubuntu Versions

The openfoam-dev pack provides a packaged installation for Ubuntu of the current development line of OpenFOAM, known as OpenFOAM-dev, that contains the source code for the next major release of OpenFOAM. The pack is updated weekly to bring cutting-edge developments to users without them needing to compile source code.  Updates can conveniently be installed as part of a standard update within the apt package management tool.  The openfoam-dev pack works with the version of ParaView provided within the latest packaged version release of OpenFOAM — currently v4 (openfoam4) which installs the paraviewopenfoam50 pack.

The openfoam-dev pack is available for the following versions of Ubuntu Linux 64bit only:

  • 14.04 LTS, codename trusty
  • 16.04 LTS, codename xenial

Scotch / PT-Scotch 6

Scotch is a third-party library providing a method for parallel decomposition for cases in OpenFOAM.  PT-Scotch is a version that itself runs in parallel, so offers a further option, in particularly when meshing in parallel with snappyHexMesh.  Prior to version 6, Scotch and PT-Scotch clashed so it was not possible to link both of them to an application like snappyHexMesh.  Version 6 includes a fix to allow both the libscotch and libptscotch libraries to be linked to the same application.  However, version 6 is not available as a standard package on Ubuntu, since the Debian package maintainers have failed to upgrade to version 6 since its release in December 2012.

Therefore, to circumvent this dependency problem, we are now releasing the openfoam-dev pack for Ubuntu with the object libraries for Scotch/PT-Scotch v6.0.3 built from our standard ThirdParty-dev repository.  The package management system no longer installs libscotch-dev and libptscotch-dev as dependencies, but if those packages are installed, e.g. for another version OpenFOAM, they are simpler ignored.

Installation

Follow the usual instructions to install OpenFOAM-dev on Ubuntu with Scotch 6.