Recently, I installed Abaqus 2016 on a few different Linux Distros for workstations in my lab and my PC. Here’s a summary of the issues I encountered and my solutions.
Unsupported Linux Distribution
ABAQUS 2016 officially only has support for SUSE and Red Hat (and CentOS). By default, the installer runs a prerequisites check and an error will return if you runs an unsupported Linux release. I have Fedora 25 for one of my PCs and I successfully installed Abaqus 2016 on it using the following workaround.
The Abaqus installer get the release info using the script located at <installer_dir>/Linux64/1/inst/common/init/Linux.sh. I overrode the command to obtain the OS release using
DSY_OS_Release="CentOS"
I chose CentOS because Fedora is close to Red Hat Linux. I also disabled other system checks by defining environmental variable DSY_Skip_CheckPrereq in the shell before the installation.
export DSY_Skip_CheckPrereq=1
To satisfy the prerequisites of Abaqus, some additional packages must be installed. For example, the libstdc++.so.5 can be installed by
sudo dnf install compat-libstdc++-33
Now you should be able to install Abaqus on your favorite Linux distribution.
Graphical Issues
I failed to start the Abaqus/CAE when the installation done. I got an “X Error” telling me “fmd_GLContext::create(): glXCreateContext() failed”. My Nvidia driver version was 375.26. I found my problem similar to this post. They also gave a suggestion to run Abaqus using
XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1 abaqus cae -mesa
This works, however, at the price of disabling the hardware acceleration. After some research online, I found this error was related to the indirect GLX rendering. In recent versions, Xorg changed its behavior to disallow indirect GLX by default, probably due to some security concerns.
I tried a few different methods to re-enable the indirect GLX rendering, including modifying the xorg.conf and adding serverargs in startx, but all failed. Finally I found solution in this post to add a wrap for Xorg command. Slightly different in my Fedora 25, my /usr/bin/Xorg is already a wrap, so I simply added the “+iglx” argument in the script:
exec "$basedir"/Xorg "$@" +iglx
Might not be a perfect solution, but hey, now Abaqus can be run natively on my Nvidia GTX 1080!
Fonts Issues
The fonts in my Abaqus/CAE GUI was extremely small and ugly at first. I solved it by installing the 100dpi font in my system:
sudo dnf install xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-15-100dpi-7.5-16
I have no idea why this works and I still don’t know how to switch to other fonts. Let me know if you have better ideas about that.
License
This work is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License.