how to get a shell with PATH's setup to work with FEniCS on Debian Linux system

Question

I recently installed FEniCS on a Debian Linux system. Previously I was using it on a mac. When I used it on my mac, I "started" FEniCS by double clicking on the FEniCS folder to obtain a shell the familiar message

This is a shell with PATH's setup to work with FEniCS. If you are new
to FEniCS you probably want to have a look at the DOLFIN demo
programs. They are located under

/Applications/FEniCS.app/Contents/Resources/share/dolfin/demo

For more information please visit the project website:

http://www.fenicsproject.org

Within this terminal window I could run my programs. However, on the Debian Linux system I can't find how to start a shell in which FEniCS programs can be run. Can someone help me?

Answer 1

If you installed FEniCS from the package manger, for instance by running

sudo apt-get install fenics

then you should be able to run FEniCS programs without modifying your environment. The demo programs will be available in /usr/share/dolfin/demo. However, this directory is write protected, so you should copy this to a directory where you have write permisson. There is a script dolfin-get-demos that comes with the FEniCS installation that will do this automatically for you. Simply run

dolfin-get-demos

and the demo files will be copied to your home directory, that is, $HOME/dolfin-demos.

Comments

Thanks a lot. I ran the script and it created the folder, just like you said. When I tried to run the demos I got the message

---------------------------------------------------
DOLFIN runtime dependency is not met.
Install the following python module: 'ply.lex'
and make sure its location is listed in PYTHONPATH.
---------------------------------------------------

So it appears that my problem is a missing python module now.

---

Install the package python-ply:

sudo apt-get install python-ply

I'm not sure why this wasn't installed when you installed fenics. Which version of Debian do you have?

---

Thanks for the quick reply. After running the command you mentioned and trying a FEniCS program again, I got

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "demo_poisson.py", line 37, in <module>
    from dolfin import *
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/dolfin/__init__.py", line 16, in <module>
import cpp
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/dolfin/cpp/__init__.py", line 42, in <module>
    exec("import %s" % module_name)
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: No module named common

I have Debian 7.8.