Code_Aster will not run tutorial on Beta3a

Hi all,

I'm completely new to these CAE tools & was hoping to evaluate the CAELinux beta3a Live DVD as a possible means to model the airflow & thermal tranference inside a new product to determine the amount of ventilation required.

However, I have spent the last three working days trying to go through the Introducion tutorial based on the Piston study, and I have yet to get the finite element analysis to run.

In that time, I have had to work out how to generate the mesh in the absence of the menu option (present in earlier Salome versions but not in 3.2.1) only to have the mesh computation fail ('Admin' to the rescue there), suffered 'No space on device' errors running from DVD, installed a 3GB HDD into my PC formatted as a Linux swap drive, doubled the RAM, replaced the 3GB drive with a 40GB drive & run the \"Install to HDD\" system (twice, because the first time it hung on updating /etc/fstab due to a 'No space on device' error), figured out how to get Synaptic to work through the company's internet proxy (which requires user authentication) so I could install the apparently missing rsh and rcp tools and I *still* haven't got any further with the tutorial than pressing the 'Run' button on ASTK & looking at the message window to see it fail every time with EXIT_CODE=2.

The error box suggests that I check .rhosts which is entirely absent from the LiveDVD and, unsurprisingly, the HDD installation. The fact that the Code_Aster help is in a laguage I neither read nor speak is huge hinderance and I am rapidly running out of time to spend on this evaluation exercise.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not complaining as I think the guys trying to put this stuff together as a complete package are doing a great job & deserve support but, if I can't even get through the introduction tutorial, I can't justify spending more time on it.

If anyone has any clues as to how I can get the ASTK client & server to talk to each other, then I'll give it one more day but if it still fails, I'll have to give up.

Following up to my own post, I finally got it to work by abandoning rsh/rcp and switching to ssh/scp having tried almost every possible combination of .rhosts & /etc/host.equiv entries (and that was *after* I figured out the rsh service wasn't running & started it).

Note that, to make this work, the ssh connection has to be configured not to require a password. Google was my friend with that. It's a timesaver to test the connection using a shell terminal i.e.:-

[CAEpc.local] # ssh -l -n root localhost echo Hello

Also noted that when ASTK is started from a terminal with
[CAEpc.local] # astk --debug 0 --clear
it will exit with a 'Variable not found' error when ssh/scp interface has been selected using ASTK Menu Configuration -> Interface.

Now all I need to do is figure out how to model airflow into, inside and out of a box assembled from two pieces for which Solidworks files exist...

Steve Smith wrote:

Now all I need to do is figure out how to model airflow into, inside and out of a box assembled from two pieces for which Solidworks files exist...

For sure you need to save SolidWorks files as igs.

Cheers
RadeK