Enabling FEA for Freecad in Debain 13 Trixie

Debian 13 Trixie is missing two packages that enable Finite Element Analysis in FreeCAD.

• libspooles
• calculix-ccx

Trying to manually download and install libspooles from Debian 12 fails as it is looking specifically for dependency libopenmpi3 and Debian 13 packages libopenmpi4. Libopenmpi3 and libopenmpi4 can not be installed side by side. The solution was to down the source package for libspooles from Debian 12 and then build it on Debian 13. This builds it against libopenmpi4. The other problem is that libspooles fails to compile on Debian 13. There are 3 lines in ETree/src/transform.c where NULLs need to get changed to 0. Run the Debian build package command to find out exactly where....

dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc

If you don't want to modify and compile libspooles yourself, you can download mine here. After downloading or building install it...

sudo dpkg -i libspooles2.2_2.2-14_amd64.deb

Next download the Debian 12 calculix-ccx, and then install it....

sudo dpkg -i calculix-ccx_2.20-1_amd64.deb

and you should be good to go!