error installing pythonflu210 ubuntu

[Hon Fai Choi]

Hi,

I am working with OpenFoam 2.1.0 and python2.7 on an Ubuntu Oneiric (11.10) system.
I am trying to install pythonflu210 from the ppa-packages available from the launchpad-site of the flu-team. I get the following warnings, of which the last one says that it can't find the install_lib and hence no python modules are installed, which is effectively the case. Shouldn't 'build/lib.linux-i686-2.7' be 'build/lib.linux-i386-2.7' ? Does someone has suggestion?

warning: sdist: standard file not found: should have one of README, README.txt 
warning: check: missing required meta-data: url 
warning: check: missing meta-data: either (author and author_email) or (maintainer and maintainer_email) must be supplied 
warning: install_lib: 'build/lib.linux-i686-2.7' does not exist - no Python modules to install  zip_safe flag not set; analyzing archive contents… 
Installed /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pythonflu-9.0_porting210_-py2.7.egg 
Because this distribution was installed -multi-version, before you can import modules from this package in an application,
you will need to 'import pkg_resources' and then use a 'require()' call similar to one of these examples, in order to select the desired version:     
pkg_resources.require("pythonflu")  # latest installed version    
pkg_resources.require("pythonflu==9.0-porting210-")  # this exact version    
pkg_resources.require("pythonflu>=9.0-porting210-")  # this version or higher 

thanks,
Hon Fai Choi

[Alexey Petrov]

Dear Hon Fai Choi,

Ye, thank you for using pythonFlu.
Sorry, we were a little bit lazy to deliver the new pythonFlu version.
So, this error could be the consequence of our silence.

The installation procedure for pythonFlu were changed and user need to use a little bit different steps to install and use this package. One of the primary steps to use the installed pythonFlu it is to source corresponding OpenFOAM environment  (so, user can have more than one pythonFlu for different OpenFOAM versions / forks on the same host). Something like :

   source /opt/openfoam210/etc/bashrc

Check, how pythonFlu works -

  python -c "from Foam import ref; print ref.vector()"

It should print something like -

    <Foam.src.OpenFOAM.primitives.vector.vector; proxy of <Swig Object of type 'Foam::vector *' at 0x7f949c799ed0> >

I am going to update the installation instructions (but it will take some time ;) …

Best regards,
Alexey

[Hon Fai Choi]

Hi Alexey,

Thanks for the quick reply. I am trying to have interactive access to OpenFoam for an optimization procedure, so if I can do that with PythonFlu, that would be great. It would be nice if I can access and modify the mesh and boundary conditions as data structures instead of modifying the input-files. That would allow for more efficiency when running optimization on top of OpenFoam.

I already have the OpenFOAM environment sourced. I added the command 'source /opt/openfoam210/etc/bashrc' to my .bashrc, as instructed in the OpenFOAM installation procedure. OpenFOAM works fine, I already checked that.

The problem is that when I run 'sudo apt-get install pythonflu210', nothing gets installed besides confflu, managedflu210, libboost-dev and libboost1.46-dev. I have tried to locate the pythonFlu modules (assuming they should be in a folder named Foam), but I couldn't find anything. I assume that that has to do with the warning "install_lib: 'build/lib.linux-i686-2.7' does not exist - no Python modules to install" that I received. When I checked pythonFlu using 'python -c "from Foam import ref; print ref.vector()", I get the error-message that  no module Foam could be found. 
I thought it may be a typo in the install scripts, since 'lib.linux-i386-2.7'  would make more sense than 'lib.linux-i686-2.7' . Could this be the problem?

thanks,
Hon Fai      

[Alexey Petrov]

Dear Hon Fai,

We can not reproduce the problem you have. Let's check step by step.

First, which version of OpenFOAM do you use? And where this version is installed.

Our launchpad packages were prepared in the assumption that they will work and be installed with the official "deb" packages (like OpenCFD or OpenFOAM-Extended). For example, if you have installed OpenCFD version of pythonFlu, it should be located somewhere under "/opt/pythonflu210-9.0-porting-3" folder (just next to the corresponding OpenFOAM installation). Sinking into the technical details, pythonFlu installation procedure extends corresponding OpenFOAM's "bashrc" with its own specific, something like the following lines will be added at the end

source /opt/managedflu210-1.0-1/bashrc

source /opt/pythonflu210-9.0-porting-3/bashrc

Could you write the launchpad PPA you have used to install pythonFlu deb package?
Also, could you write the output of the following command

dpkg --print-architecture

?

Launchpad pythonFlu deb packages were build specifically for each architecture, so, the used launchpad PPA should exactly coincide with your architecture.

Could you write the complete sequence of the commands you have used to start the installation procedure?

And at last, could you remove the broken pythonFlu installation, run a new one and sent the complete console output to me?

P.S.
  Thank you for sharing your ideas about pythonFlu usage scenario.

Best regards,
Alexey

[Hon Fai Choi]

Hi Alexey,

thanks for the suggestions. I have removed all pythonflu packages and started from scratch, and now it works! I don't know what I did wrong in the previous install, since I repeated the exact steps as before. Maybe you updated something in the ppa?
Here are the commands that I used:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:flu-team/i386
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pythonflu210

the output of dpkg -print-architecture was:

i386

Anyway, pythonflu210 seems to work now, so I'll start experimenting with it. Thanks for your patience and all the help and sorry for the confusion :-).

thanks again,
Hon Fai