[Dune] DUNE Virtual Machine

[Bernd Flemisch]

Dear DUNE,

I created a Virtual Machine (VM) containing DUNE 2.1. You can download 
it from
http://dumux.org/tcl_dune.ova

In order to be able to use it, you have to have a software that can 
handle ova-files. For example, Oracle's VirtualBox, www.virtualbox.org, 
which is available for all major operating systems and Windows. There, 
you click "File -> Import Appliance..." to set up the VM. Double-click 
on the icon will start it. Opening a terminal will set you up within a 
directory where the DUNE modules are stored. The grid-howto is already 
fully built.

In order to keep it as minimal as possible, I set it up on Tiny Core 
Linux, which, to me, appears to be the currently most reasonable 
lightweight Linux distribution, tinycorelinux.com. The initial size of 
the VM was around 40MB, after inclusion of everything that is necessary, 
it now has 182MB, including the grid-howto binaries. VMs based on 
standard Linux distros tend to have more than 1GB.

I see a great potential in using VMs. For teaching, every student can 
bring his own laptop with his favorite OS, just needs to obtain one 
single file (ok, maybe plus the VirtualBox), and the whole course can 
work within exactly the same environment. Usually, you are not able to 
achieve this even inside a single CIP pool. And at home, for the student 
everything will still work as before. Also for research, storing your 
system as VM will enable you to exactly reproduce your results in 10 
years from now on (assuming that some software handling ova-Files still 
exists then).

If you like it, please feel free to host the VM on the DUNE website. If 
you really like it, I also volunteer to come up with some sort of 
maximal DUNE VM including svn, automake, MPI, SuperLU, ALUGrid and so on.

Kind regards
Bernd

P.S.: In case you are interested, here are the steps to get DUNE onto 
Tiny Core Linux (TCL):

1. Install TCL on your (virtual) HDD or USB stick following 
http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/install.html.

2. Install the following packages (TCEs) via the AppBrowser (available 
as an icon on the desktop): gcc, compiletc, gfortran.

3. If you are using a non-US keyboard, also install the kmaps TCE, and 
add your desired keymap to /opt/bootlocal.sh, e.g. for German:
loadkmap < /usr/share/kmap/qwerty/de-latin1.kmap
Reboot.

4. Obtain the DUNE tarballs. There is no browser (you can of course 
install one, but even Midori uses 40MB on the VM by having to install 
several other packages), but there is wget:
wget http://www.dune-project.org/download/2.1/dune-common-2.1.0.tar.gz
and so on.

5. Create a file tcl.opts containing
CONFIGURE_FLAGS=" \
   CXXCPP=/usr/local/bin/cpp \
   FC='gfortran -fno-use-linker-plugin' "

6. Run
./dune-common-2.1.0/bin/dunecontrol --opts=tcl.opts all

7. Cross your fingers.

-- 
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Bernd Flemisch                               phone: +49 711 685 69162
IWS, Universität Stuttgart                   fax:   +49 711 685 60430
Pfaffenwaldring 61                  email: bernd at iws.uni-stuttgart.de
D-70569 Stuttgart                  url: www.hydrosys.uni-stuttgart.de
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