Built some new Packages for Slackware...
 

Hi Forum

I have built some new stuff for Slackware 13...

This is Engineer's stuff, so, pls forgive me for not giving that much attention to other kinds of apps, that may be more the like of the reader ... :)

I Have built :

XFoil http://web.mit.edu/drela/Public/web/xfoil/
AVL http://web.mit.edu/drela/Public/web/avl/


Calculix http://www.dhondt.de/
CGX


Wings3D http://www.wings3d.com/


Should anybody be interested in any of this, I will gladly share how I did it.


Why don't these guys at Simulia, Dassault Systemes, Autodesk, etc free their source code for us slackers to build Abaqus, Catia, and Inventor for Slackware... ?? :)

BRGDS

PS: Given that CGX, CCX, XFoil and AVL are number-crunching CPU hogs, I used Intel compilers to build them, but the results can easily extrapolate to gcc/gfortran.

You could submit your slackbuilds to www.slackbuilds.org to share with the community.

Yup that'd be better! Most slackers rely on Slackbuilds.org for their packages! Good work btw! :)

Hi @tramni1980 @Shylock

I would really like to make Slackbuilds for these.. but I guess that I am not competent enough... :

for all the packages that I built, there was an extensive hackery... ( only exception made to cgx , ( a standard ./configure make trackinstall ) :

I had to create parallel 3 source trees, hack into the makefiles of 2 of them in order for them to build double precision libraries with ifort from INTEL, hack into one source file of the spooles library, to fix an illegal unreferenced function definition ( this is "set" to build in Fotran Compiler of Cray systems ), cd into the main source tree, and finally type make, not before having also hacked the makefile so that the fortran Linker of Intel would not try to find some _MAIN ( -nofor-main directive ) anmd use C++ linker instead.

All this about cgx... AVL and XFoil are only "a bit" harder... but still manageable...

Wings 3d will go easily, once you install ERLANG OTP from slackbuilds, and ESDL library ( erlang bindings for sdl )...

... wether it will run smoothly without segfaulting, this is another story... sometimes it does... sometimes it does not....


Has a will of its own .... :)

So... for me to automate all this in a slackbuild... it would require me to master sed, and awk.... I am working on this... but I am still "grasshoper".... :D

BRGDS

Alex

Probably easier to create working copies of the modified files, then generate patches which you can apply during the SlackBuild. These patches modify the source files so that they then resemble your working ones. Also means you don't have to mess around with sed and awk in your script, and everyone can see the changes the patches make by just opening them up. See for example http://slackbuilds.org/repository/13.0/desktop/vwm/, which has a directory called patches. In this directory are three patches I created to modify the Makefiles so it would install correctly (mostly fixing hardcoded paths).

Although the Slackware philosophy encourages the smallest amount of patching as possible, there are times when it's unavoidable, and it seems to me to be the most transparent way of making changes to a source tree.

Agree with the comments about the patches, and it might be nice to run this stuff too..

As far as the "Why don't..." question: well the usual answer is Money, in one form or anoher.

Hey Alex,

If you're still around, did you mean by

that you got both CGX (PRE/POST) and CCX (SOLVER) running?

If so, I am interested.

After reviewing the tutorial on how to write a build script earlier yesterday, I thought it sounded much simpler than I anticipated and had visions of calculix crunching in my very near future. But after reading what Alexvader and pwc101 had written, and seeing how old this thread is, I stalled. Sounds like it may not be straightforward. Well.....here's my story:

I need to run Calculix, and soon. Professionally and commercially speaking.

I balk at the idea of getting into a Windows version for the time being. Calculix is a linux program.

I thought the quick and simple interim approach would be to install Arch on another box and run it there. Trouble was, after a week of messing with a straight cookbook guided install, Arch refused to run on my hardware. Aborted.

Today I will dig out my old box that used to run Debian and Calculix but had since installed vector linux and no calculix, and install Debian and calculix on it again. I hope it's not too too old, slow and small.

Then for the long run, I keep hope alive that someday I will be proficient and versed enough to do a fine install of slack cix. With a little help from my friends.

You could grab the RPM and try rpm2tgz. I've found this approach works more often than you'd expect.

yes thanks I didn't know about it. I found a couple of places to download the rpms that looked good, but funny thing, the most important rpm file of the four needed is "not available." - On either site. And I can't find any complaints about it on the web. Don't know what to do.

Really appreciate your help though. My world is expanding.

Well if you can't find the right rpms, you could try to look for Debian files instead?

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/.../alien.1p.html
https://slackbuilds.org/repository/14.2/system/alien/

First, a little more background:

is 'ccx*.'

Calculix is cgx and ccx. These two components run independently; the output from one is used as manual input to the other, and vice versa. ccx is the important one; it is the solver whereas cgx can be replaced by other alternatives.

So ccx is what I need, and all that seemed available out there was cgx. (end of "background")

But then I did find this:

https://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/opens....83.x86_64.rpm

I first thought (before you told me about alien) this might be distro-specific and might not work (simply because it is from an opensuse repo), so I held off trying it.

Now I ask everyone, can a rpm be distro-specific? I should just try this rpm and see if it works. I observe that regardless of its repo, the file name does not reference a distro.

I think this is my first avenue to try. Second, I am studying how to create an rpm from a .spec; I was able to download a ccx.spec from sourceforge, the site that has a link for the rpm but no rpm. The 3rd avenue, I think, would be to do the alien thing with debian files.

The apparition on sourceforge is ccx-2.5-2.fc18.x86_64.rpm (the file I wanted but doesn't exist). I was also supposed to use spooles-2.2-1.fc18.x86_64.rpm and also have the package arpack installed. Pretty simple sounding.

In contrast, the file I did download from 'tumbleweed' is ccx-2.16-1.83.x86_64.rpm, and tumbleweed lists the following as required, in conjunction with it:

libarpack.so.2()(64bit) -
libblas.so.3()(64bit) -
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.14)(64bit) -
libgcc_s.so.1()(64bit) -
libgcc_s.so.1(GCC_4.0.0)(64bit) -
libgfortran.so.5()(64bit) -
libgfortran.so.5(GFORTRAN_8)(64bit) -
liblapack.so.3()(64bit) -
libm.so.6()(64bit) -
libm.so.6(GLIBC_2.2.5)(64bit) -
libm.so.6(GLIBC_2.29)(64bit) -
libpthread.so.0()(64bit) -
libpthread.so.0(GLIBC_2.2.5)(64bit) -
libspooles.so.2.2()(64bit) -

There are several alternative .rpm file downloads associated with each of these (I think; I actually only looked at one so far). So suddenly, I seem to have quite a number of choices to make to hopefully get it to work, including trying the dubious and doubtful (?) choice to just use spooles-2.2-1.fc18.x86_64.rpm.

But before doing anything about ccx, I will take what I got from sourceforge for cgx and see how that works. If that doesn't work, perhaps I can save lots of labor messing around with this ccx rpm stuff and cut to other avenues. Come to think of it, avenue 3 is simpler than avenue 2, which is more or less an extension of avenue 1. I do intend to explore all of it and learn it, and keep this alive, but I also need to get cracking and crunch some FEA numbers right away, so I will be doing that probably with another box, debian, in parallel, if I can't get it going on slack real quick like.

I am keeping a journal of all my thoughts and actions as this develops, and of all my other efforts as a slacker newbie, as they unfold, and everything I learn. It really seems to help the learning process and remembering things and keeping it straight. And so I intend, whether successful or not in running calculix with slackware, to thoroughly document the effort here, in a manner friendly to the newbie.

Hope that doesn't sound too noble, if you know what I mean.

Hey Alexvader, wherever you are, we got stuff in common: not only are I a mechanical engineer, I also lived in Japan before! I speak da language and everything! Well maybe not everything

Here's another little strange thing I wondered about, on www.dhondt.de, it says

Question: can rpm files really care whether they run on Intel machines, or is this just a little slip of jargon?

The files to which this refers are the 3 I downloaded from sourceforge, as talked about above.

I do have an inquiry in to the author, but I don't really expect a reply.

They probably meant on a standard x86 (or x86_64) computer rather than an arm based system.

Yeah I think so. I got to thinking later on it's probably just something like that.