CAE-tools to be included in CAELinux

Hello dear CAELinux-Friends,

I congratulate the contributers to the CAElinux-distribution and I specially appreciate the initiative to make a VMware-Package of it. That's the way of the future!
A) However, why not use Debian with its neat apt-system?
I listed below a few CAE- and scientific tools that might be considered to be included in the CAElinux distro. Sometimes it is good to have several tools serving similar purposes because if one tool misses a feature another one might provide it or a work around even if it is not as user-friendly.
Most of the listed tools are OSS. They can be easily found in google once you know their names.
What do you think / know about the listed packages?
C) Are they worthwile?
D) Do you have other / better propositions?

1. BRL-CAD (3D-CAD)
   3D-solid-model-CAD with ray-tracing, very powerful, check out screenshots and Intro to MGED. UI is a bit outdated, though.
2. gCAD3D (simple CAM)
   3D CAD with some interesting conversion capabilities; some NC-code generation.
3. EMC (CNC)
   powerful Machine-Tool controller: converts NC-code into machine-axes control signals up to 6-axes (even for hexapods as in hydraulic flight simulators), requires RT-Linux. I don't know whether that fits into CAELinux well.
4. Netgen / NGSolve (FE suite for mech. structures)
   3D-FE-Solver with neat Pre- and Postprocessor, for elasticity, heat conductance, magnetism featuring adaptive meshing.
5. Tochnog (mech. FE- and CFD-solver)
   nonlinearity, plasticity, large deformation, mesh adaptation, thermal conductivity, can use GID as pre- postproc.
6. DUNS (CFD-solver)
   turbulent, compressible, unsteady flow sub- and supersonic for structured meshes only.
7. GID (3D-solid-modeling, meshing postproc.)
   integrated GUI für solid modeling, meshing, external solvers, postprocessing. Not opensource! Only free as limited demo version.
8. Gmsh (3D-solid-modeling, meshing, postproc.)
   excellent multiplatform GUI FLTK. Does not yet support NURBS.
9. ODE (3D multibody dynamics Engine)
   very powerful, no integrated GUI but Opensim is a GUI for it, Python binding PyODE available.
10. Opensim (3D robot simulator)
    based on ODE-multibody-engine.
11. Simbob (multibody dynamics with nice GUI)
    based on ODE-multibody-engine, runs on Windows
    Made with MSVisual C++ V7.0 and MFC-Library. (don't know whether it runs under wine, maybe under the Mono environment) Simbob link
12. Dynamechs (3D-multibody dynamics)
    bodies in star-topology: one central body and n chains of linked elements attached to it. Good for walking or humanoid robots, mars lander etc.
13. FreeCAD (3D-multibody dynamics)
    similar to VisualNastranDesktop. Good GUI but somewhat less userfriendly than the commercial original.
14. Octave / SciLab (numerical computing)
    Octave is similar to Matlab and SciLab is similar to Simulink.
15. Maxima (comuter algebra system)
    equivalent to Maple, partly compatible syntax, excellent Frontends are: texmacs or wxMaxima
16. R and RKward (statistics)
    R is the core and RKward is the frontend. Similar to Statistica or SPSS.
17. GSL (GNU Scientific Library)
    lots of sophisticated, numerical, standard algorithms in C that could be called by Python scripts.
18. gEDA (CAE-suite for electronics development)
    Scheme Editor, circuit simulator,wave form viewers, PCB layout, Gerber files

I would be glad if some of these tools (or even better replacements) could be included in CAE-Linux.

roleic

Here is one more CEA-tool that might be interesting:

19. Impact (FE solver for large deformations)
Useful for crash analysis or metal forming. It can be used with GiD or gmsh as pre-/postproc.
impact.sourceforge.net

roleic

Hi,

just some quick answers:

1. PClinuxOS is offering a much simpler platform to create LiveCD/DVDs compared to Debian and it is also using apt (apt4rpm & synaptics). Moreover, the ease of use / stability of this distro is in my opinion much better than Knoppix or other Debian-based Live distro.
2. Thank you very much for your suggestions.
   GMSH, Octave, Scilab are already included in CAELinux, Impact & GSL will be part of beta 2 and I will try to add progressively the other packages.
3. But, the following softwares will not be included: GiD (commercial), EMC (needs RealTime Linux) & Simbob (windows-based & don't want to mess with Wine).

Great! Thanks.
I'm looking forward to the next release.

By the way, obviously I had some difficulties to get an overview of:
a1) which packages are already included
a2) which of those are plugins for Salome
b1) which are planned to be included in future releases and
b2) which of those will be plugins for Salome
c) which proposed packages were already decided not to be included and the reasons for that.

E.g. I am still not sure whether ngsolve is already part of CAELinux.
Some of this info is distributed among the posts in this forum but not all. Did I miss some info given somewhere else in this website? Or would it help to simplify forum communication if such a small list could be published somewhere in this web site or in a prominent place in the forum?

Hi,

I cannot wait for the release of the new version. I am sure that it will be great.

OpenFOAM just released a new version today, ie version 1.3. There are major improvements over version 1.2. It will be nice to have the new version of OpenFOAM included.

phsieh2005

Thank you for the information, I was just starting working on OpenFOAM integration... so I will directly switch to 1.3!!