Frequently Asked Questions about OpenTURNS

General

Step-by-step introduction

If you are looking for a short introduction, please see QuickStart page.

Need support ?

If you need free of charges support, notice that you can read a dedicated page: GettingHelp.

Who are we ?

Open TURNS is developed by a mixed team of mathematicians and software developers spread over three collaborating companies. For more, see the Authors page.

Troubleshooting

Build & install process failure

Failures during the 'make check' stage

You probably forgot to install rotRPackage as described in the HowToInstall page. Please install it.

R CMD INSTALL utils/rotRPackage_1.4.3.tar.gz

If you are using an instance of R installed in the system (ie, as root), you need to get root privileges to perform the rotRPackage installation or to install it in a non-standard location. Check your path to know which instance your are using. This instance must be the one you will pass to the configure script.
If you don't have the privileges to perform the installation with the preceeding command, use this one:

R CMD INSTALL --library=PRIVATE_DIRECTORY utils/rotRPackage_1.4.3.tar.gz

where PRIVATE_DIRECTORY is any directory you are allowed to write in (for example, $HOME/Rpackages). Then, set the environment variable R_LIBS to this directory (e.g. export R_LIBS=$HOME/Rpackages) if you use a version of R prior to 2.5.0, else it is better to use the environment variable R_LIBS_USER.
You can then test the installation by invoking R, then trying the following command: 

$ R

R : Copyright 2006, The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
[...skip...]
Type 'q()' to quit R.

> library(rotRPackage)
>

If everything is ok, the command is executed without any error or warning.

Failures during the 'make check' or 'make installcheck' stage

Your installation of R cannot find gs, the ghostscript interpret. It is a problem related to the packaging of R, you can fix it by installing gs.

Usage

Error while loading OpenTURNS python module

If when you load OpenTURNS python module, you have an "No module named openturns" error, like that : 

Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Oct  5 2007, 13:36:32)
[GCC 4.1.3 20070929 (prerelease) (Ubuntu 4.1.2-16ubuntu2)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from openturns import *
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: No module named openturns
>>>

You must define the PYTHONPATH environment variable to the directory where is installed your OpenTURNS' python module. This module is located in the "$HOME/openturns/lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages/openturns" directory where :

  • prefix is the directory where OpenTURNS is installed;
  • you use python version X.Y .

for example if have installed OpenTURNS in the "$HOME/openturns" directory and if you use python 2.5 you must run : 

$ PYTHONPATH = $HOME/openturns/lib/python2.5/site-packages
$ export PYTHONPATH

before launching python.