Technical Solution

Installing Altair HyperWorks CAE software in Fedora instead of RHEL

Zyxware Technologies | | 2 min read

Altair HyperWorks is an Enterprise level Computer Aided Engineering software that is widely used for rapid design exploration and decision-making. This software is supported both in Windows as well as Linux. The Linux version is tested to work with SUSE and RHEL. However with a little tweaking this can be made to run in Fedora.

We were contacted by a Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) firm in Technopark, Trivandrum - DSI Technologies to help set this software in Fedora. We sent our team and successfully set up both version 7 and version 8 of Altair Hyperworks working on Fedora 8.

Since Altair Hyperworks is a popular CAE software we felt that we should share our experience with the rest of Hyperworks users out there who are looking to try the software in Fedora instead of RHEL. Here are the steps we had to follow to get the software working.

Installing Hyperworks 8 on Fedora

1) Download the tar archive and rename the file as hw8.tar
2) Extract the contents of the archive
tar -xvf hw8.tar
2) The hyperworks installation script was created for Korn Shell. So install ksh
3) Run the installation script
./hw8/hwsetup.sh
4) Edit /etc/hosts and add the license server name and ip address
5) Create ~/runhm.sh and copy the following into the file

export ALTAIR_LM_LICENSE_FILE=port@hostname
/usr/lib/hw8/altair/scripts/hm

6) Edit /usr/lib/hw8/altair/scripts/arch_init.ksa and goto line 84 and comment the three lines 84-86 that sets the LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.1 param
Installing Hyperworks 7 on Fedora

1) tar -xvf hw7.tar
2) Install ksh
3) ./hw7/hwsetup.sh
4) Edit /etc/hosts and add ip of server
5) Create runhm.sh with the following contents

export ALTAIR_LM_LICENSE_FILE=port@hostname
/usr/lib/hw7/altair/scripts/hm

6) Edit /usr/lib/hw7/altair/scripts/arch_init.ksa and goto line 84 and comment the three lines 84-86 that sets the LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.1 param

7) Hyperworks 7 depends on the following rpms. Download the rpms from the fedora site and install
rpm -i --nodeps tcl-8.3.5-96.0.1.i386.rpm tk-8.3.5-96.0.1.i386.rpm

8) Edit /usr/lib/hw7/altair/scripts/archLib.ksa and insert the following at line 132


                4) export ALTAIR_GCCVER="_RH8"

                   ;;

This is to set the Architecture to RH8 for gcc4

The company is currently testing out the software on Fedora 8 and if they are satisfied with the performance they are planning to move their development platform to Fedora. If that happens we will be happy to have helped a commercial entity to move to the GNU/Linux platform thereby strengthening the claims of the maturity of the platform for use in commercial entities.

 

 

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