Installing Gambit 64 bit on CentOS (or on any Linux)

Installing Gambit 64 bit on linux machines is little tricky as you need libraries for both 64 bit and 32 bit, and also compatible libraries. You will often face irritating problems like  'file libXp.so.6 not found' or 'lnamd64/fluentlm-helper90: No such file or directory' etc. 

I searched various platforms to get the solution (including cfd-online) and here is one which works best (I think) to solve these problems. This is for CentOS, you can use other similar package installers (like apt-get) to install these libraries.  
  
Step 1: Install gambit 64 bit from command line

Step 2: Search for libraraies which are missing, you can use 'yum whatprovides $libraryname' for the same and then install using 'yum install'. Note you need to install both 32 and 64 bit libraries so instead of doing 
 yum install packagename.i686 or   yum install packagename.64

do yum install packagename - it will install both 64 bit as well as 32 bit.

Here are the libraries you need 

$yum whatprovides libstdc*
$yum install compat-libstdc++-33-3.2.3-69.el6
$yum whatprovides libXm.so.3
$yum install openmotif22-2.2.3-19.el6
$yum whatprovides libXpm.so.4
$yum install libXpm-3.5.8-2.el6

Step 3: Run Gambit

and it should work. :)

Running tecplot on Ubuntu

I was facing this problem of running Tecplot on Ubuntu 12.04 as the background screen becomes transparent (both with and without -mesa command), which makes it very difficult to post-process and visulalize data.

No transparent background 

With transparent background

One solution was to switch off the 3D unity effects by running the command

$metacity --replace

However it will change disable entire 3D effects and you may lose important buttons. A better solution is given in tecplot knowledge base.

http://www.tecplot.com/knowledgebase/2012/07/20/translucency-when-using-ubuntu-unity/

In summary running these commands will help you to get the desired result.

$export XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1

$tec360

On a similar note, below is also interesting as I found similar problem in making animation from tec360. 

http://tecplottalk.com/bb/viewtopic.php?p=3640&sid=1edab011e41a39e49fa3faf97e57af5a