Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

CAELinux 2020: Linux for engineering

Filed under
GNU
Linux
Sci/Tech

CAELinux is a distribution focused on computer-aided engineering (CAE) maintained by Joël Cugnoni. Designed with students and academics in mind, the distribution is loaded with open-source software that can be used to model everything from pig livers to airfoils. Cugnoni's latest release, CAELinux 2020, was made on August 11; readers with engineering interests may want to take a look.

CAELinux's first stable version was released in 2007 and was based on PCLinuxOS 2007. The distribution was created to make the GPL-licensed finite element analysis tool Salome-Meca easier to obtain. CAELinux 2020 is now the eighth release of the distribution, which is based on Xubuntu 18.04 LTS, and has expanded its focus over the years into an impressive array of open-source CAE-related tools.

The minimum requirements for CAELinux 2020 are a x86-64 platform with 4GB of RAM for "simple analysis." For professional use, the project recommends 8GB of RAM or more with a "modern AMD/NVidia graphic card." The entire distribution can be run from an 8GB USB memory drive, with the option to install it to disk (35GB minimum). For those users (like me) who wanted to run the distribution as a virtual machine, the project recommends the commercial VMware Player over the open-source VirtualBox project due to "some graphical limitations" of VirtualBox.

There are too many different software packages unique to the CAELinux distribution to cover them all in a single article. Since the distribution is built on top of Xubuntu, CAELinux comes with all of the standard tools available in the base distribution. In addition to the standard packages, however, CAELinux bundles CAE pre/post processors, CAD and CAM software, finite element solvers, computational fluid dynamics applications, circuit board design tools, biomedical image processing software, and a large array of programming language packages. A review of the release announcement provides a full list of the specific open-source projects available, including a few web-based tools that merely launch the included browser to the appropriate URL.

It would be impossible for me to claim familiarity with the full range of tools provided, but I was familiar with many. For example, FreeCAD has been written about at LWN, and CAMLab was used in our article on open-source CNC manufacturing. I have personally used other bundled packages like FlatCAM for isolation routing of homemade circuit boards and Cura to slice 3D models for printing. What was particularly neat about exploring the distribution was getting introduced to new open-source software that matched my interests. I discovered KiCad EDA's PCB Calculator utility (simple, but handy), and I am looking forward to checking out CAMotics as another CAM alternative for my CNC router.

Read more

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.