Elmer virtual machine (based currently on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS) is such a nice environment that I thought to share some information on that. It may be often preferably to old or incomplete binaries available.
The Elmer Virtual Machine has been initially created (by T.Z.) to provide the ideal platform for giving courses. It ensures that different operating systems can run exactly the same Elmer setup. At the same time the Elmer virtual machine provides perhaps the best possible user experience for starting users. Below some of the pros and cons of the virtual machine are listed.
Pros:
- Best possible Elmer experience out of the box
- Many auxiliary software are also provided (Paraview, Gmsh,...)
- Also MPI is fully supported
- Updates in code can be taken into use by simply sayig "svn update" and "make install"
- Size of the VM is quite large (2-3 Gb) which makes in impossible to download on slow connections
- It is more difficult to share data between software under the VM and those running under the main OS
- The virtual machine can never be quite as fast as the native OS. For parallel jobs parallization is
efficient only within one processor. - The 64-bit version may require some alterations in the BIOS setup, even though the OS would be 64 bits
- Install a VM player, e.g. Vmware player on your computer. Vmware player works for sure, also other players might be used.
- Copy the virtual machine from http://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/sci/physics ... in/Vmware/
If in doubt use the 32-bit version. - Unzip the virtual machine to a suitable destination
- Run the VMware Player and open the virtual machine (with suffix .vmx) in the unzipped directory
- In VMware Player choose "play virtual machine"
- After a rather lengthy boot time you should be asked for a password "elmerfem"
- Elmer exacutables do not have icons so open a terminal and call them from command line: ElmerGUI, ElmerGrid, ElmerPost,...
- To compile a fully fresh version of Elmer go to directory Source/Elmer and say
"./getsource" and "./buildelmer". - To update just recent changes to the fem part go to directory Source/Elmer/trunk/fem and say
"svn update" and "make install"
standard qwerty keywboard for the 23 ascii letters (Finnish, English, German, ...). A notably exception here
is French. So if you're typing a French keyboard the password is "el,erfe,".
-Peter