Installation/Howto porting to new platform

From OpenFOAMWiki

These pointers for starting a port to an unsupported platform were posted in a discussion about porting to Mac OS X by Mattjis Janssens.


  • in the XXX/.OpenFOAM-1.1/bashrc add a check for your machine type and set WM_ARCH and WM_MPLIB. You can leave WM_MPLIB empty (which will link in the dummy/ Pstream (which saves you having to compile lam or mpich))
  • in the XXX/.bashrc add your architecture and set all the relevant variables to access gcc and java and such
  • make a copy of e.g. $WM_DIR/rules/linux to $WM_DIR/rules/$WM_ARCH and adapt the settings in these files.
  • have a look at XXX/Allwmake script which compiles up some binaries needed by 'wmake' itself ('cd wmake ; ./makeWmake')
  • have a look at XXX/src/Allwmake and compile in the same order (leaving out the lam and mico if you don't want to run parallel or FoamX)
  • compiling OpenFOAM from source usually requires you to also compile Paraview from source in order for ParaFOAM to work correctly