Installing OpenVSP from NASA

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Hello,

i apologize if this is the wrong place to ask this.

New to Linux and OpenMandriva. So I don’t know much.

I’d like to install OpenVSP but have had little success

There are installations for Windows. Mac, Ubuntu, and Arch.

see the installation wiki

but it looks like it needs to be compiles from source to run in OpenMandriva.

I fooled around for three or four hours the other day trying to compile it with no success. Pretty much all or the help I got came from the AI on Brave.

I’m hoping that someone has been successful in doing this and can provide some guidance.

Sorry for bothering those much smarter than me.

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Welcome

The problem you will run into with AI is that OpenMandriva is a unique distribution. OpenMandriva is not (your distro here.) and it has to be dealt with accordingly.

I did find the program on GitHub.

I even found some instructions for building it as an rpm.

For a newbie, building this might be more than you can do. How big a hurry are you in? This is a good question. :grinning_face: I filed a package request for you. There is no guarantee that the devs will fill this request and no timeline if they do. It is what we get when everyone is a volunteer.:rofl:

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Thanks for the quick reply and for what you’ve already done.

I tried to put the link to the installation wiki for OpenVSP in my post, but it didn’t seem to work.

I’m an old man who retired from an engineering job at the end of 2012 to take care of my mom. She died about 9 months later.

I feel like by brain is turning to mush and I need to exercise it. I’m at about 20% brainwise of where I was in my prime. So I’m trying to do brain stuff.

I’d been running W10 but when Microsoft forced the change to W11, which will not run on my good enough for me computer, I took the plunge and decided to finally switch to Linux which I’d been thinking about for at least 20 years. Looking into the distributions, OpenMandriva seemed like a good fit for me.

It took awhile, but I got Julia, FreeCad, RawTherapee, and KiCad installed and running on my older HP Z440 Workstation and I want to learn them. Actually not a bad computer, 6 core 3.6 GHz processor, 32 Gb of Ram, decent Quadro graphics card, a 2Tb M.2 drive on the motherboard for my main drive and a 4Tb SSD for my data, photos, music, etc.

I like airplanes, was over at NASA Langley in the 70s while in college. Had my private pilots license which I gave up for health reasons. Still in the EAA.

From the videos, OpenVSP looks like a fairly powerful program. And as I told a friend who is going to be racing his plane in Roswell this September, ‘I could spend a lot of whatever time I have left fooling around with this program.’

So not a huge rush but it would be a neat program to get running and learn.

By the way, Mr AI and I probably spent at least 5 hours trying to compile the program this afternoon/evening. We almost got there. I still don’t know very much about Linux but I know slightly more than I did.

Do rpm builds generally work for OpenMabriva? I might give that a try tomorrow.

Thanks,

Mike

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Hi Mike

:waving_hand:

Welcome to OM from another old engineer (chemical in my case). Sorry 'bout your mom. Mine died in 2008. Dad’s still kickin, so I’m helping him. My mom would be horrified at the “man-cavification” that slowly evolved with the house… :wink:

Now onto your issues - OM is a RPM based distro. There are some differences with fedora and how they spec things out.

Do a search here in the forum (avoid AI if you can) for compiling. I’ll get you started here:

That kind of a system should be fine. With that you can “test compile” in virtual machines (for example in a debian/mint/fedora virtual machine) or even use 64gb of that system drive for another distro to experiment with and work out the bugs.

One thing you will likely trip over is the package names; those tend to vary by distro. Also you may need to build some libraries along the way.

From the build instructions, for both debian and fedora, they are creating the actual deb/rpm package file. You actually don’t need to do that when compiling on linux. Oftentimes the make command will install what is needed where.

Cautionary note:

Also, you may want to head over to the matrix chats, since some of these issues are more likely to be seen by the system programmers over there - who can probably cut your hair pulling time in half.

Welcome again

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Hmm. Another old retired guy? You’ll fit right in. :rofl:

You can post links and screenshots now.

That workstation sounds like it should do everything you could want. It was built to be a workhorse. OpenMandriva should run fine on it.

I don’t know how many things you have compiled as RPMs, but you should be able to install this meta package and build them yourself.

sudo dnf install basesystem-build

Looking at the instructions on their website, I would create a folder called build and cd into it before running said instructions. I have only built a few rpms and don’t have the experience to guide you through the process. Plenty of others around here can do that.

Once you have the rpm, it can be installed easily.

However, their GitHub page lists a slew of dependencies and all of them must be fulfilled before you can install that rpm. Some of them can be installed from our repositories, but some may have to be built from scratch using the instructions for each from their source. I have not looked into those other than seeing the list.

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On Windows:

OnWindows
OnWindows300×237 40.8 KB

On Linux:

OnLinux
OnLinux300×400 80 KB

On OpenMandriva:

OnOpenMandriva
OnOpenMandriva997×720 62.2 KB

Full Disclosure:
I have not (really) tried any of the BSDs as a daily driver, nor have I really given any of the “minimalist” distros, such as gentoo, a try in this role either. Minimalist distros seem to me much better suited to server roles.

The BSDs I’ll get around to eventually

:cactus:

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I messed around with GhostBSD for a while. Installed a few packages from their native repo, none of which worked. It is my opinion that BSD OSs are not ready for prime-time yet.

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As noted before I don’t know what the heck I’ve been doing as I’m a total newbie when it comes Linux.

My programming experience is limited. The only programming course I had was a FORTRAN 66 course in the late 60’s. By the way, the measure of a great FORTRAN programmer is the amount of Computed_GoTo statements they use, the more the better. In the late 90’s I transitioned over to MATLAB which I used till I retired.

I fooled around trying to get OpenVSP compiled or running for at least 6 or 8 hours today and it beat me, it beat me bad.

So as much as I hate to admit, it I installed the Windows version and run it under WINE. It’s embarrassing and not what I wanted, but it runs.

Hopefully, someone much smarter than I will get it to run as a Package, I think that’s what it’s called. When they do I’ll use that.

Thanks for all the help.

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For the record, ANY programming language that doesn’t have some form of a GOTO statement does NOT have the right to call itself a programming language :grin:

And compared to many who call themselves programmers today, those FORTRAN skills actually make you a “real” programmer. Bunch of script-kiddees today.

Oh, and FORTRAN is still being used:

On the OVSP front, did you ask over on the matrix chat? 'Cause I’m betting you were tripping over some of the dependencies. There’s a number of things I have to run in a virtual machine because I can’t get it to work under OpenMandriva :man_shrugging:

And in the meantime, if you get stuck again, feel free to reach out here or over on matrix

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If it runs under WINE, it runs just fine. :wine_glass:

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“GvMariani left a comment (OpenMandrivaAssociation/distribution#3493)

We already had a request for OpenVSP in the past, but it was rejected because some deps were not building and looked abandoned:
Old rejected request.

I would add that the STEPcode project (needed by OpenVSP build) seems to be revived; see:
STEPCode on github.
So perhaps, this time we could package this…”

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Thanks

Hope they succeed.

Thank God there are people smarter than me!!

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I agree!

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Any reason to use a virtual machine instead of a distrobox container?

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I’m quite stupid about all of this, so I don’t have a clue as to which is better.

Hopefully someone much smarter than I can provide some guidance.

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Use what you are comfortable with. Right now, you have it running on WINE and there is nothing wrong with that. I have programs running on WINE and I’m happy with that. Even Steam runs on WINE, so I think WINE is one of the greatest things to happen to Linux.

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Inertia mainly. When I was setting up my VMs I debated using docker / podman / similar type containers. My system has the horepower and resources, so that wasn’t the decider. I actually built my main desktop on the assumption I’d be using multiple VMs & containers..

Heck, virt-manager even supports some container types.

And nothing prevents you from running both; alongside each other and nested.

I just haven’t played with it much (I plan to, eventually)

I guess maybe another piece is that with a container, the underlying container framework has to be running pretty much all the time. With a vm, it’s just a file on my drive until I tell it to run.

I may be wrong on that (or out of date) but I’ve got a tool that works and I know how to use it. Containers may be a much better tool for what I do, it’ll just take time for me to get around to playing with them.

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