Friday, March 06, 2009

Missing libXm.so.3 in ANSYS 11 SP1 on RHEL4

According to ANSYS Version 11.0 Service Pack 1 - Platform Support Table, ANSYS 11 SP1 for Intel Xeon EM64T/AMD Opteron is fully supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0. One would expect that installing and running ANSYS on this OS would be painless. However, although installation along with setting licence went smooth, I had problems starting ANSYS. The error was:/usr/ansys_inc/v110/ansys/bin/linem64t/ansys.e110: error while loading shared libraries: libXm.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory Therefore, the first thing I did was to check if my RHEL4.5 comes with this library. To do this I did as a root:find / -name "libXm.so.3"As a result I found this library in /usr/X11R6/lib/. This library belongs to openmotif package, however in my case I had 32bit version of this package. My RHEL4.5 and ANSYS were for x86_64 platform. The only thing I had to do, was to install 64bit version rpm -ivh openmotif-2.2.3-10.1.el4.x86_64.rpm Openmotif package contains libraries of graphical user interface that is used in ANSYS. This package can be found on RHEL4.5 installation CDs/DVD. Once the package was installed, libXm.so.3 was also located in /usr/X11R6/lib64/. This was enough to start ANSYS.

Very similar problems were found when the same ANSYS 11 SP1 was installed on CentOS5.2 on the same machine. So, in my case there was no apparent advantage in using RHEL4.5 over CentOS5.2. It appears that that similar problems occur whether I was using officially supported OS than not supported.

One would expect that when ANSYS claims that something is supported it would work out of the box. Unfortunately, this is not the case. This was not the only problem with ANSYS. I also cannot start CFX launcher. I get en error /var/tmp/anslaunch110.chris.12.sh: line 3: cfx5: command not found The same situation is in CentOS 5.2. However, since I do not need to use CFX I did not spend any time trying to make it work. If someone knows, how to fix it, I would be very grateful. It seems that some paths must be added to PATH environmental variable.

Finally, I have to point out that ANSYS Version 11.0 Service Pack 1 - Platform Support Table says RHEL 4.0 not 4.5! So maybe if I was using over 4 years old OS, everything would work out of box.