FreeFOAM is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. See the file COPYING in this directory, for a description of the GNU General Public License terms under which you can copy the files.
FreeFOAM is developed and tested on Linux, but should work with other Unix style systems, notably Mac OS X ©. The support for Microsoft Windows is a goal, which, however, is still far off.
In order to build FreeFOAM you need to have CMake with version 2.6.2 or newer installed. http://cmake.org
CMake requires a native build system. On Unix like platforms GNU Make is recommended. http://www.gnu.org/software/make
In order to build FreeFOAM you need a C++ compiler with good support for template expressions. The g++ compiler from GCC-4.3 and above will do fine. http://gcc.gnu.org
The flex lexer generator. Version 2.5.33 is known to work. For more recent versions there have been reports of problems. http://flex.sourceforge.net
zlib compression library. http://www.zlib.net
The METIS graph partitioning library, version 5.0pre2. If your package manager doesn’t contain it, you can also have FreeFOAM build it automatically for you (see the installation section). http://glaros.dtc.umn.edu/gkhome/metis/metis/overview
To check out a current development version of FreeFOAM, git is required. http://git.or.cz
In order to run FreeFOAM in parallel, a communications library is required. The following list gives an overview of the available options:
MPI (Message Passing Interface): There are many implementations of the MPI standard. The one that has been tested and is known to work with FreeFOAM is OpenMPI.
PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) is available from http://www.csm.ornl.gov/pvm.
GAMMA (Genoa Active Message MAchine) is available from http://www.disi.unige.it/project/gamma.
If you use an MPI library, the ParMetis library is required. If your package manager doesn’t contain this library, FreeFOAM can build it automatically for you (refer to the installation notes below). http://glaros.dtc.umn.edu/gkhome/metis/parmetis/overview
MGRIDGEN is a grid coarsening library for multi-grid solvers. FreeFOAM can build this automatically for you. Please refer to the INSTALL file for license restrictions. http://glaros.dtc.umn.edu/gkhome/mgridgen/overview
pro-STAR © input/output library. FreeFOAM can build this automatically for you. Please refer to the INSTALL file for license restrictions. https://wci.llnl.gov/codes/visit/3rd_party/libccmio-2.6.1.tar.gz
If you want to build the ParaView plug-ins, you need a ParaView with the development headers and the corresponding CMake configuration files (ParaViewConfig.cmake, ParaViewUse.cmake, ParaViewLibraryDepends*.cmake). Most likely this means that you have to build ParaView yourself. http://paraview.org
Some of the provided tutorial cases require the M4 macro processor. http://www.gnu.org/software/m4/
Automatic API-documentation generator. Required to build the source documentation. http://www.doxygen.org
For installation and basic usage instructions, refer to the INSTALL file.
http://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/openfoam/ please only ask questions related to OpenFOAM there.