How to start Fenics

Question

Hello i just saw about this software and and downloaded the windows version from http://fenicsproject.org/download/windows_details.html

i installed it and in C drive i am looking for .exe program so i run and check the demo codes.
is it work like that? or do i need to combine it with other software?

Answer 1

FEniCs is not a CAE tool, like for instance StarCD, that comes with a GUI. It is rather a bunch of code, you can call on when writing your own code. This code is then compiled and interpreted by your system to deliver results and plots.

To run the examples, you can paste the code provided in the tutorials into a python file - say test.py - and then call it from somewhere, where there is a python interpreter available (a shell or an IDE like eclipse).

Comments

Thanks for your answer, as i told i am totally new in this kind of environment. As i workied on COMSOL and other GUI softwares. i want to that what is python file? and is there any tutorial of the very beginners when it show all these things

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It's a plain text file that ends on .py. There is a tutorial to start with python from scratch: learnpythonthehardway
Chapter 0 deals with the setup and chapter 1 with a first python file....

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There should be an launcher (probably batch file) of python intepreter which sets environment variables needed to import DOLFIN (FEniCS user-interface).

I recommend executing and modifying demos supplied with FEniCS distribution.