ANSYS Workbench Installations and RedHat 6.6 – Error and Workaround

We were recently alerted by a customer that there is apparently a conflict with ANSYS installations if Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 (RHEL 6.6) is installed. We have confirmed this here at PADT. This effects several versions of ANSYS, including 15.0.7, 14.5, and 14.0. The primary problem seems to be with meshing in the Mechanical or Meshing window.

The windows errors encountered can be: “A software execution error occurred inside the mesher. The process suffered an unhandled exception or ran out of usable memory.” or “an inter-process communication error occurred while communicating with the MESHER module.”

The error message popup can look like this:

or

Note that the Platform Support page on the ANSYS website does not list RHEL 6.6 as supported. RHEL is only supported up through 6.5 for ANSYS 15.0.

That all being said, there is a workaround that should allow you to continue using ANSYS Workbench with RHEL 6.6 if you encounter the error. It involves renaming a directory in the installation path:

In this directory:

/ansys_inc/v150/commonfiles/MainWin/linx64/mw/lib-amd64-linux/

Rename the folder ‘X11’ to ‘Old-X11’

After that change, you should be able to successfully complete meshes, etc,. in ANSYS Workbench. Keep in mind that RHEL 6.6 is not officially supported by ANSYS, Inc. and their recommendation is always to stick with supported levels of operating systems. These are always listed in the ANSYS Help for the particular version you are running as well as at the link shown above.

Since the renamed directory is contained within the ANSYS installation files, it is believed that this will not affect anything else other than ANSYS. Use at your own risk, however. Should you encounter one of more of the errors listed above, we hope this article has provided useful information to keep your ANSYS installations up and running.