Installing Dune is slightly more complex than installing other finite element software, because Dune is not a monolithic program. Instead, it consists of interdependent components, called modules that have to be installed separately. At the very least, you will need the so-called core modules, which are dune-common, dune-geometry, dune-grid, dune-localfunctions, and dune-istl. Typically, you will also need the staging modules, which are dune-uggrid, dune-typetree, and dune-functions. Beyond that, a plethora of further modules offers additional functionality, e.g., more grid data structures or discretization modules.

Linux distributions offer various Dune modules as binary packages for convenient download and installation. For example, the table on this page shows the packaging status of dune-common in different distributions. You can expect the other core modules dune-geometry, dune-grid, dune-localfunctions, and dune-istl to be packaged in the same version.

If you want to use the C++ interface, or if you want to mix binary packages and modules built from source, then you need to read about how to build Dune from source.

Package details

The precise naming of the packages differs between distributions. For example, in Debian-based distributions, the packages are called libdune-foo-dev, where foo is a module name like for example common, grid, geometry, istl, or localfunctions. A complete list of Debian packages is available. For development, you may also want the corresponding debug symbols, which Debian ships in separate packages ending with -dbgsym.

Offline documentation is available in the libdune-foo-doc packages and installed to /usr/share/doc/libdune-foo-doc/doxygen/index.html.

Installing Dune core modules

To now install the core Dune on a Debian-based system run the following command:

sudo apt install libdune-grid-dev libdune-istl-dev libdune-localfunctions-dev

This will install the entire set of Dune core modules – the ones not explicitly listed will still be installed, because they are dependencies of the others.

We recommend you also install the packages from the staging set:

sudo apt install libdune-uggrid-dev libdune-functions-dev

Helping with packaging

If you want to help with the Debian packaging, you can download the packaging information for (for example) dune-common by

git clone https://salsa.debian.org/science-team/dune-common.git (Browse Repository)

The Debian package history and the Debian issue tracker can be found in the Debian Package Tracker.

The links for all other available modules are similar.