You may have been lucky and your IT department wants to update your PC, or you may have been unlucky and your PC has died; either way this means you will need to move Dymola to your new PC. In this blog post I’m going to go through what you’ll need to do to move your Dymola install to a new PC.
Figure 1 – Your PC
Things to Think About When Moving Dymola to a New PC
Installation
Contact your Dymola distributor (which could be us at Claytex) to:
- Get the appropriate Dymola installer, if you don’t have a copy.
- Request an update to your node-locked license if you use one, you will need to provide the host ID / MAC address of the new machine.
To find the new PCs host ID you can use this executable hostID.exe, available using this download link. Extract the file from the zip folder. Execute the file by double-clicking on it, then select Setup and this will display the window shown in Figure 2. This shows the host ID required for the Dymola node-locked license, with instructions for copying it. Alternatively once Dymola is installed on the new PC, you can get the host ID by going into Tools > License Setup > Details; this can be done in Demo mode.
Figure 2 – Executing the hostID.exe utility to discover the PC’s host ID
You will need to install Dymola on the new PC. We have a previous post with a quick guide to Installing Dymola on a Windows PC. This includes the setup of the license and compiler. If you need to install a compiler you can look at the compatible options here, C compiler | Dymola – Dassault Systèmes. Once installed, you can use one of the demo examples in File > Demos to confirm Dymola will simulate a model successfully.
If you use third party Modelica libraries not supplied in the Dymola installation, you will need to install these on your new PC. You may need to contact the library supplier for the installer and for an updated node-locked license. If these are libraries from Claytex, we have this blog post on installing application libraries from Claytex on Windows; we require the host ID to update node-locked license.
Setup Scripts
When you first open Dymola, it will run a group of scripts in the Commands window which can contain your Dymola settings, as highlighted in Figure 3.
Figure 3 – At start-up Dymola runs scripts which can contain setting preferences
The majority of settings selected via Tools > Options are stored in the setup.dymx file, this includes those set using the Flags and Variables dialog . This happens automatically when you change the setting from the default values. If you open this file, these settings are in the <persistent-flags> and <persistent-variables> sections.
Settings from the Simulation > Setup dialog are not automatically stored in the setup.dymx file. Although they can be added manually as described in this post, Modifying Setup.dymx for Automatic Flags. I have personalised my startup.mos to add the settings for the Simulation Setup flags that I want to persist between Dymola sessions, as shown in Dymola Setup – Where is it?.
These script files run at start-up can be copied from the old PC to the new one to transfer your Dymola settings when you move to a new PC. You will need to check that any paths in the files are still correct for the new PC, the setup.dymx includes compiler settings that may have changed for example.
If you have modified the unit conversion scripts from your Dymola installation, as we described in this previous post Display unit custom conversions – A how to guide, then these will need to be copied from the old PC. Since that post was written, the scripts run at start-up have evolved, and so we recommend running the unit conversion script in your personalised startup.mos now.
We have spoken on the Tech Blog in the past about creating opening scripts and opening functions to make it easier to open the libraries that you work with regularly in Dymola. So when you move to a new PC be sure to copy these files across also.
Environment Variables
Dymola finds libraries by searching the directories in the environment variable MODELICAPATH. If you have modified the Modelica path, to included libraries in the Libraries menu for instance, then these setting needs to be implemented on your new PC.
If you decided to save your Modelica path between sessions using the setting highlighted in the Options and Library Management dialogs below, then your Modelica Path will be included in the setup.dymx file. However if this is not the case, you will need to configure your Modelica path again on your new PC. This can be done directly in the PCs environment variable or via the Tools > Library Management > Modelica Path interface in Dymola.
Figure 4 – Setting to save the Modelica Path to the setup.dymx file in Tools > Options on the left and Tools > Library Management on the right.
There may be other Dymola related environment variables that you will need to carry over when you move to your new PC, for information on accessing your environment variables see here. These could be for:
- the DYMOLA_RUNTIME_LICENSE.
- Related to Modelica libraries you use, such as the environment variables needed for our own VeSyMA-TerrainServer library.
- Related to software coupled to Dymola such as rFpro TerrainServer, FTire or SimCenter Tire.
Time to Move PC
Having read this post you should have a better understanding of what you need to consider and do when moving your Dymola installation to a new PC to make this process easier.
Written by: Hannah Hammond-Scott – Modelica Project Leader
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