[CIG-LONG] Recommended Petsc version with Gale

[Walter Landry]

Dennis Harry <dharry at warnercnr.colostate.edu> wrote:
> I just (today) successfully did an install of GALE 1.4.1 with all supporting
> packages on a new Fedora 2.6 machine.  As Walter mentions, I found petsc 2.3.2
> to work.  But I ran into one quirk.  I opted to let petsc install blas-linpack
> and mpi when I configured it (as I said, this is a brand new Fedora machine so
> it's pretty empty in regards to packages).  

For the future, it is best to use the official MPI and blas/lapack
packages.  INSTALL.RHFC5 has a list of packages.

> Things looked good, but petsc stalled in "make test" - no errors, it
> just stalled after telling me it was running the 1-processor test.

I do not know what is going on there.  You would probably have to ask
the Petsc developers.  They will probably want you to use the latest
release, though (and Gale does not work with the latest release).  In
general, I never run the Petsc tests anyway.

> I ctl-c out of that (after letting it think overnight) and tried the
> Gale install, which complained about not finding mpi libs.  

When you have Petsc download MPI, you should tell Petsc to install MPI
in a separate directory.  Then you can tell Gale to look there for
MPI.

> So I installed mpi manually following the instructions on their web
> site (which was surprisingly easy).  Then I tried to re-install
> petsc without having it download mpi.  It griped.  

That is odd.  You told it where the new MPI was and it complained?
What was the error you got?

<snip>
> Now I'm on to other aggravations.  I can't get paraview to install properly. 

That is unexpected.  You should be able to just untar it and run it.
What is the problem?

Cheers,
Walter Landry
walter at geodynamics.org