OracleVM and CAELinux: Setup and Testing with OpenFOAM

I have succeeded in getting OpenFOAM working. I wasn’t able to install it correctly on windows, despite several attempts, but I did discover an excellent distribution of Linux called CAELinux. This distribution is designed for engineers and programmers, and comes with a whole host of tools, including OpenFOAM. It also has code editors, the Arduino IDE, and visualsation tools for representing data (such as ParaView). It even has Qt installed!

I have been running CAELinux through the Oracle VM Virtual box. I had used the previously for testing a Torque3D project, and it works very well. It seems to run quickly and reliably, with some exceptions. I am beginning to come around to linux as an operating system. I had never really used it before, with the exception of some experience using Ubuntu in college. However I have used both CAELinux and another distribution, the rec

I was able, with some difficulty, to run the OpenFOAM “Motorbike tutorial”. This basically calculates the airflow around a motorbike object. I used Paraview to visualise the solution. I think I achieved relatively good results with it, although the learning curve with both OpenFOAM and paraview is very steep.

The next step is to load my own custom models in place of the stock motorbike, and conduct CFD analysis on them.