CAELinux 2007

Great news!

By the way, today a new version of calculix (1.7) has been made available on the site. Could you update it too?

Is there a way to help you during this process?

Massimo

Hi Joel,

great news. I can hardly wait!

Regards,

Arnold

I like the sound of this. I'm running PCLinuxOS2007 on my desktop. One question. How hard would it be to release some sort of script to take a fresh PCLinuxOS installation, and turn it into what you're releasing as CAELinux? The topic of how to reduce your bandwidth costs has come up several times. If you create a 2-step install process: (1) DL ad install PCLinuxOS2007 from their servers/mirrors, (2) run the \"CAELinux-me\" script to DL/install/compile the rest of the packages. Maybe even allow you to check/uncheck certain applications. I would assume you may have something like this in-place for building the images in the first place. Could be a useful option. At a minimum, a \"follow these steps to turn your clean PCLinuxOS install into CAELinux\" instruction set might be well received by the less-n00bish in the community.

@Massimo:
At the moment, it is difficult to parallelise the work to develop the distro, but your help would be really appreciated when the distro will be release, for example, to write tutorials (Salome=>Calculix? ) or provide examples / docs in the Wiki. From the feedbacks, it seems that the most important point to develop is documentation, tutorials & examples to smooth the learning curve as much as possible. In my opinion, this is the biggest difference between opensource and commercial CAE codes : the learning curve is much steeper for OpenSource softwares due to a \"lack\" of user oriented documentation.

@Njank:

this is a great idea, but it is not possible to realize it at the moment. A lot of adjustments are made by hand on script files, most of the CAE softwares are compiled from source or have complicated install/customisation procedures which cannot be easily scripted. Moreover, the compilation can take nearly 12 hours for all the codes, which is not a really acceptable time for all users.

Your idea is however very interesting for the future:
if I can manage to create RPM packages of all the codes, it would be extremely easy (and safe) to use a script to turn a standard PCLinuxOS distro into CAELinux. The problem lies in the creation of the RPM packages... I am not an expert in that stuff and the softwares to be packages do not follow the standard configure/make/make install procedure... so it's difficult to develop RPM for these codes.

But if someone can try to package some of the codes in RPM, I would really appreciate a feedback. Developing RPMs of CAE codes would also allow to share the development work with the community => a faster development cycle (=> I may have some free weekends sometimes ). So if anybody is interested, I am waiting for your feedback.

Concerning bandwidth, I have found a new \"sponsor\" which will provide an unlimited & high quality server for the next release, so it is no more a problem to provide HUGE files for download.

Thank you all for your feedback...

CAELinux 2007 is advancing well. Now I am finishing the testing & writing docs...

Regards,

Joël

Hello Joel:
I am eagerly waiting for your new release. What is the expected date of the release.
Thanks,

Sunil