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83ingD33p
Asked: 2018-07-03 06:30:42 +0800 CST

How to run two different versions of Gmsh on Ubuntu 16.04 and related issues

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I want to have two versions of Gmsh: 2.10.1 (http://gmsh.info/bin/Linux/gmsh-2.10.1-Linux64.tgz) and 3.0.6 (the latest) on my Ubuntu 16.04 LTS machine. Both of which I seem to have installed successfully. However, I observed something weird: apt-cache policy gmsh gives this:

  gmsh:
    Installed: 2.10.1+dfsg1-1ubuntu4
    Candidate: 2.10.1+dfsg1-1ubuntu4
    Version table:
   *** **2.10.1+dfsg1-1ubuntu4** 500
          500 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/universe amd64 Packages
          100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

While gmsh -version gives 

3.0.6

What does it mean? Is this also related to another observation that the Ubuntu Software listed only 2.10.1 version before I installed 3.0.6 and after installation of 3.0.6 it doesn't list anything for gmsh.

Running gmsh starts the 3.0.6 version. I don't know how to start the other.

Assuming I've both the versions, I believe I'll have to do something like source the correct files from .bashrc with some aliases? I'm not sure how. Can someone help? What's going on and how can I use both versions as per need?

software-installation package-management apt versions 16.04

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    It seems that you have two versions:

    • locally compiled and installed 3.0.6, located in /usr/local/bin/gmsh
    • version 2.10.1 installed from official ubuntu package, located in /usr/bin/gmsh

    So you can call them with full execution path or set aliases in ~/.bashrc:

    alias gmsh2='/usr/bin/gmsh'
alias gmsh3='/usr/local/bin/gmsh'
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