Description of problem: I had installed openmpi, then added mpich2. Noticing that at that point /usr/bin/mpirun appeared to exclusively serve mpich2, I uninstalled mpich2 again. At that point I had no /usr/bin/mpirun, even though 'rpm -qli openmpi' claimed it was part of openmpi. I then tried to uninstall openmpi via 'yum remove openmpi'. This didn't pick up openmpi-devel as an additional package to remove (even though the latter ought to depend on openmpi !), and eventually printed this to the console: Running Transaction Error in PREUN scriptlet in rpm package o openmpi-1.3.1-1.fc11.x86_64 was supposed to be removed but is not! (yum then claimed the package was successfully removed, while it actually wasn't.) In other words, there are three (possibly related) issues I'd like to report: 1) An apparent untracked conflict between openmpi and mpich2 resulting in /usr/bin/mpirun being owned by both, and thus removed with the first of the two I uninstall. 2) Missing dependency tracking between openmpi-devel and openmpi 3) Some internal error resulting in the above failure to uninstall it. This is openmpi-1.3.1-1.fc11.x86_64. Thanks,
openmpi-1.3.3-1 resolves the openmpi specific parts of this issue....however, there is a need to coordinate with mpich2 in order to resolve the "both own mpirun" problem. The issue is that it isn't really feasible to use alternatives to select MPI implementations (mainly because alternatives is intended to be system wide while MPI selection needs to be much finer grained). In order to use openmpi instead of mpich2, you need to load the openmpi module via environment-modules. This will put the openmpi mpirun in your path before /usr/bin and therefore override mpich2's mpirun. From a command prompt or in your login scripts: module load openmpi-<arch> will get you openmpi usability.
openmpi-1.3.3-2.fc11 has been pushed to the Fedora 11 testing repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report. If you want to test the update, you can install it with su -c 'yum --enablerepo=updates-testing update openmpi'. You can provide feedback for this update here: http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F11/FEDORA-2009-7951
Unfortunately a new update was pushed which omitted adding this bug to a new update to supercede the one above. Please visit: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F11/FEDORA-2009-10848 and test the version in updates-testing before it gets pushed to stable (which will happen very soon) to make sure there are no regressions.
This should be resolved by the current openmpi, closing.