Read-only installation of blueCFD-Core

[wyldckat]

Symptom

If the installation of blueCFD-Core is done (for example) at C:\Program Files\blueCFD-Core-2016 and if the option Enable write
permissions in user-related folders within the installation is not used during installation, that will lead to the complete installation to be set to read-only state, resulting in the need to use a less conventional way to use blueCFD-Core.

[wyldckat]

Solution

This depends on which version of blueCFD-Core is being used, for which the following sections were written:

• For blueCFD-Core 2016-1
• For blueCFD-Core 2016-2 and newer

blueCFD-Core 2016-1

If blueCFD-Core 2016-1 is being used, then this means that the installation will work for the most part, but it's left to the user the need to manually run the cases from the user's own folders, instead of running it from inside blueCFD-Core's folders.

More specifically, if the user starts a new blueCFD-Core terminal and run the following commands:

mkdir $FOAM_RUN
cd $FOAM_RUN
cp -r $FOAM_TUTORIALS .

(These commands related to the introductory section of chapter 2 on the OpenFOAM User Guide.)

This will not work when it's installed in read-only mode, because the folder defined in the variable FOAM_RUN is the path C:\Program Files\blueCFD-Core-2016\ofuser-of4\run, which will also be set to read-only.

This means that in this scenario, the user is expected to instead navigate in Windows Explorer into their own Documents folder, create a new folder, right-click on it and start a new blueCFD-Core terminal there. Only then will the following command work as intended:

cp -r $FOAM_TUTORIALS .

blueCFD-Core 2016-2 and newer

Starting with blueCFD-Core 2016-2, a mechanism has been built into the blueCFD-Core terminal start-up sequence to copy and set-up the terminal environment to work from within the user's own folder, which is defined by Windows' environment variable USERPROFILE.

This means that everything in blueCFD-Core should work as expected, namely the following commands should work as intended:

mkdir $FOAM_RUN
cd $FOAM_RUN
cp -r $FOAM_TUTORIALS .

(These commands are related to the introductory section of chapter 2 on the OpenFOAM User Guide.)

The actual location of folder the FOAM_RUN variable points to and where the user (home) folder is now located, can be discovered by running the following commands:

cd
echo $FOAM_RUN
explorer .

This should open Windows Explorer, in the user's folder, for example at:

C:\Users\John Smith\blueCFD-Core-2016\ofuser\

Where C:\Users\John Smith\blueCFD-Core-2016\ is the folder that blueCFD-Core's read-only installation mechanism will use.

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More specific details on how this feature was implemented are provided in the report associated to the development feature, namely in Issue #34.