Just dual boot Ubuntu, it's so easy. You'll regret messing around with Windows hacks, and the various tutorials online are harder to follow when you need to translate Linux commands into Windows commands.

I had dualbooted with ubuntu before, but somehow my laptop started overheating with ubuntu. 

Besides, how good are cross compilation platforms like cygwin? I have that on windows, but it keeps giving me the error blockMesh: command not identified.

I wonder what I am doing wrong. 

If your hardware is to sloow for a virtual Machine, the only way is to install directly Ubuntu. In any case, before doing that, try with different virtual machines (Oracle Virtualbox, VM ware etc.) and different linux distros. I suggest ubuntu 12.04 that is quite lite with the classic gnome interface instead of Unity. In this way you can save a lot of ram with respect to the latest relases.

Franco

Thank you for that piece of information Franco. But lets just say, for the time being, I have taken the cross compiler route and installed the binaries for openFOAM on windows with Cygwin64 installed as the cross compilation platform. At a certain stage, during the course of running the icoFoam cavity tutorial, when I write the blockMesh command, this error pops up:

-bash: blockMesh: command not found

Is there something wrong that I am doing? Have you ever come across anything like this (I really hope you did)?

This might not be an option for you, but check out 

http://www.caelus-cml.com/

It is a fork of openfoam which installs seemlesly on windows (did so for me at least). They did strip down the code quite a lot though and made some other changes. But the core features remain, so it could still be suitable in case you are a developer.

Timofey, thank you for your response, but what might not be an option for me?

Relative to the error -bash: blockMesh: command not found it can be solved in two ways:

1. you have to write all the path to the executable. Ex: $HOME/BIN/OPENFOAM/EXECUTABLE (something like that)

2. add in the file .bashrc that is in your $HOME the path to the directory where OF binaries are installed.

The cfdsupport version is the way to go on the Windows side, see: http://www.cfdsupport.com/install-openfoam-for-windows.html. In step 2 when setting environment variables, be sure to run the .bat file as administrator in Windows 7/8.

Well, after a lot of hassle with getting openFOAM installed on Windows, I have finally decided to dual boot. I now am installing openFOAM on Ubuntu 12.04 (I have to use that version due to certain restrictions to partitioning my drive, but I am fine as long as I get to work with openFOAM).

Dear Shashank Moghe,

The better option for OpenFOAM is use on LINUX, however Ubuntu sometimes is not the best option, but it is good for the first steps in OpenFOAM. My advise is you can start using other linux distributions as Debian or CentOS, due to super computers and clusters function well with that distribution which are similar to RedHAT.

The following link shows you some example to use OpenFOAM in a debian distribution LXDE.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264865564_Numerical_Simulation_of_Cavitating_Flow_Over_2d_Hydrofoil_Using_Openfoam_Adapted_for_Debian_Operating_System_with_Lxde_Based_in_Kernel_Gnulinux

Kind regards,

Victor

Article Numerical Simulation of Cavitating Flow Over 2d Hydrofoil Us...

Dear

I used VMware Player as A virtual machine

http://filehippo.com/download_vmware_player/

and a VMware image(Ubuntu ) as a basic starting point for building a specific appliance.

http://www.trendsigma.net/vmware/trendsystemlx10.html

it work fast.

instead VMware Player u can use Virtualbox also

http://filehippo.com/download_virtualbox/

regards

Jafar