Salome-Meca installation on Linux in 2024

Since 2021 Salome-Meca has been released as a ‘Scibian9 Singularity container’, requiring the singularity environment to be installed before running the program. With this change, the program is available on all Linux distributions and on Windows systems (using WSL). It was supposed to be convenient and accessible, but the reality is different and many users have problems installing Salome-Meca on their computers.

Current systems (Linux and Windows) are constantly being updated which can result in something that worked a year ago on the system not working now. A year ago I created an article and a YT video that showed how to install the program step-by-step on the Ubuntu 22.04 system. Unfortunately now both of these sources (as well as the installation description available on the program’s manufacturer’s website) do not work. Only the installation process for Salome-meca on Windows 10/11 is still up to date. It is annoying to have to learn how to install the program again, but there is good news – it is easier now.

Step 1 – installing the singularity environment

This is probably where most users run into problems. In the previous article, the installation started with installing the “Go” programming language and next downloading and compiling the singularity environment.
Today, the easiest way is to download a .deb package containing a ready-made singularity environment. These are available on github.
I recommend downloading the singularity v3.1.5 version package (the latest v3 release). The .deb package for Ubuntu 22.04 is available here.
If you have the Gdebi installer on your system, you can install the program by clicking on the .deb package or you can install the package using the command line.

Step 2 – Salome-Meca installation

The next step is to download the SM program from the code-aster website. The best is the latest release from January 2023 marked as 2022.1.

After downloading, open a terminal in the folder where the downloaded file is located and install the program with the command:

singularity run --app install salome_meca-lgpl-2022.1.0-1-20221225

You can run the Salome-Meca program with the command:

./salome_meca-lgpl-2022.1.0-1-20221225-scibian-9

Step 3 – GLIBC_2.34 not found problem

If you are lucky your system opened Salome Meca without any problems. Unfortunately, many users saw a glibc error. The easiest way to avoid this problem is to run the program without GPU rendering using the command:

 ./salome_meca-lgpl-2022.1.0-1-20221225-scibian-9 –soft

However, if you care about the GPU, I found a solution on the forum. You need to comment out (add #) next to “libGLX.so” in the file /etc/singularity/nvliblist.conf. To do this you need to open this file with sudo privileges e.g. with the command:

sudo mousepad /etc/singularity/nvliblist.conf

where “mousepad” is the text editor on my system

After making changes, save the file and start Salome with the command:

 ./salome_meca-lgpl-2022.1.0-1-20221225-scibian-9

Ubuntu releases: Interim and LTS

People ask me about how to install Salome on Ubuntu 23.04 or 23.10. Probably the above instructions will also work . However, I recommend everyone (and I use it myself) to use the Ubuntu version marked LTS i.e. with longer support. Every two years Ubuntu releases an LTS version, which is stable and popular with users thanks to the long support period. We are close to releasing the next LTS version 24.04. It will be interesting to see if the current installation process on this version of the system succeeds. When the latest version is available I will try to record a video and present the SalomeMeca installation process there.

Still, my suggestion: I use Ubuntu from the XFCE version of the graphical system called Xubuntu. XFCE features a lightweight and simple graphical environment that is user-friendly. Xubuntu or Linux Mint, which is built on top of Ubuntu systems. If it just so happens that the Salome-Meca program is the reason you want to install Linux, and my blog is here to help you with that, then I would recommend choosing just the latest version of Linux Mint in the XFCE desktop environment. If you are used to Ubuntu and the Unity environment then there is no need for you to change anything.