Linux Journal - September 2011

[ UPFRONT ]

Computer-Aided Engineering in Linux

Engineers are some of the heaviest number-crunchers around. If you are a grad student, post doc or undergrad, you usually get whatever is lying around as your work machine. Also, depending on how inflexible your local IT department is, you may be forced to use one of the commercial operating systems around these days. What are lowly students to do when they need to do heavy computational work? You may be interested in looking at CAELinux (Computer Assisted Engineering, www.caelinux.com). This project provides a live CD that gives you all the open-source tools you might need for your engineering work. And, because it is a live CD, you can use it without touching the local drive of the machine you are using.

Like all live CDs, it has all the standard Linux desktop tools you should be familiar with, including Firefox for Web browsing, Evolution for e-mail, and OpenOffice.org for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations. Along with these applications, there are dozens of others to help with all your number-crunching work. The most recent versions are based on Ubuntu, so it should be a fairly comfortable environment for most people. Be aware, however, that you can’t use the usual software update mechanism in Ubuntu. Many of the packages in CAELinux are compiled from source and optimized, so you don’t want them being overwritten accidentally by any packages provided by Ubuntu.

Welcome to CAELinux

A really well written introduction to CAELinux is available right on the desktop, called “Getting Started”. You should start here if this is your first step into the world of CAELinux.

Last month, I looked at OpenFOAM in this space. CAELinux includes a full install of OpenFOAM. It also includes another fluid dynamics program called SALOME. This program provides a full graphical interface that takes you from forming your problem, to modeling, to calculation and through to analyzing your results. This might be a good choice for those who are more comfortable with a GUI. A series of examples on the desktop are available that provide a walk-through of the program, showing each of the steps as you go through.