MACRevit

[PeterJ]

AEC Magazine, a UK publication for which the clue is in the title, has just published a note regarding the Mac debate that took place recently after the possible April Fool screenshot, in the alt.ccad.revit group.

Now I need a new laptop and I spent some time recently playing with a G4 power-book. I was impressed so now I need to ask is Revit coming to the Mac or not?

Any more news?

P

[Wesley]

I do know that internal Autodesk questions were about who 'leaked' them, not who 'created' them...

[PeterJ]

Intriguing

Who can leak how long I have to put off making this decision?

P

[cmahoney]

There are currently no plans to release a Mac port of Revit. The images that appeared on alt.cad.revit were not real.

[hand471037]

If they aren't going to make a Mac version of Revit, then AutoDesk are fools. Mac are going to have the first consumer-grade 64 bit desktop available; a system that would run Revit very well I would think, with all that memory access space and the fact that relational databases love 64-bit systems (just ask Sun why they make thier systems 64-Bit!). Also with the wierdness that is MicroSoft, and how thier plans for the future seem like a darker and darker path for anyone to go down who's not a large company that can support the licencing costs, it would be good for AutoDesk to have an 'out'.

My next computer will be a Mac, Revit or not!

Also, if you really want a Mac Peter, I hear that the 970 systems will be coming out later this year, like around sept., so if you wait you could probably pick up a G4 real cheap when the new systems become available.

[PeterJ]

Thanks for the word Chris.

Thanks also Jeffrey but if I wait 'til September I'll have missed a ton of work through not having the tools.

Only question then is did anyone try running Revit on the Virtual PC software or running it on Wine (since I'd be going with OSX). That all sounds too much like the darkside.

I'll go buy a Dell or some such.

P

[patagoniadave]

Dude, you are getting a Dell :twisted:

[hand471037]

My attempts at running Revit on Wine (on a Mandrake Box) have been less than steller. One thing to keep in mind about Wine is that it's not a windows emulator in any way; it simply provides mimic'ed .dll's (dynamic linked libraries, I think) that operate in the same way as thier windows counterparts, but run on Linux instead. Since the majority of this is reverse engineered, or ported here are there, and it's impossible for the Wine team to make Linux versions of all the Windows .dll files, sometimes the .dll's you need to be able to run the software you want either are not available or simply don't work under those circumstaces. Also Wine can sometimes require a windows partition for the Windows program you want to run to install properly, so unless you were able to make a image of the installtion on a dual-boot windows/linux machine, and somehow move that over to your Mac, you wouldn't be able to get the software installed in the first place.

Virtual PC was bought out by MicroSoft, so the future of it's products on Mac look somewhat dark. Pie-in-the-sky, the next gen Macs are supposed to be frigtenly fast, and could *possibly* run Revit, under emulation, at full speed. But that doesn't help you now.

So, yes, you're buying a Dell I guess. But you can pick up a very decent 'Pismo' Laptop for around $500 these days. That was the last of the G3 'professional' Mac Laptops (the black ones); it's got DVD, more battery life than a new laptop, is better made, and can run OS X. You could make that your 'personal' computer, for your music/web/e-mail/life, make the PC for Revit-only, and then dump it when it's out of date (2 years) or they make Revit for Mac (?).

Just a thought.

[cmahoney]

I'm curious about your experiences, I was planning on spending some time tonight installing WINE to see if I could get Revit running. What version of WINE and Mandrake are you using. From what I know about WINE, I understand most of what you said can be true, but of the problems you mention, which impacted Revit? Did you ever manage to get it running at all?

[hand471037]

My first shot was with Mandrake 9.0, and Wine 20030118.

I haven't been able to try it yet with Mandrake 9.1, which I just upgraded to.

Wine, as you might know, is much easyer to configure with a Windows Partition present. You can make it work without, but it requires much more work and time, as well as total knowlege of where every file that program needs 'lives' when on a Window's box, and mimicing that file structure some where for it to use. See, Wine doesn't emulate, it basically tricks the application into running *without* Windows, while providing everything it asks for to work.

However, my system is a dual-boot Windows 2000 and Mandrake box. Wine currently has issues when dealing with NTFS partitions, making it much harder to get it running than if I had a FAT32 Windows 98 partition available.

Once you had a working install, you would be able to then take that install and move it to any other simular machine and have it work too. Wine is really meant as a office-wide distrobution tool, it seems, where a very experanced person sets it up, makes the image, then installs that onto all of the clients. It's over my head, and is definately not a simple Windows emulator.

So while I've had limited success with Wine, only able to get small things to run, and having problems with the NTFS system, if you had the time, and a machine to play with, you would be able to customize the system more to find out the optimal installation for Revit on Wine. I still haven't gotten Revit to run yet under Wine.

There are several other branches of Wine, some commercial, that apparently work better. Also there are two free GPL Windows emulators that I haven't had the time to try. I'm going to have my linux guru friend over for dinner soon, for my regular brain-pickin' session, and maybe we can suss our more info.

Jeffrey

[hand471037]

One more thing: my next Wine try will be a straight Wine install, where it's not referencing a Windows Partition at all, and instead is just running pure 'Wine'. This, as I said, is more work, so it will be a while before I'll be able to look serously at it. But if it does work out, then that means that you can run Revit with no Windows Partition present.

Another big issue is that I beleve that Wine supports Windows 98 more than NT/2000/XP, but I could be wrong. With Revit going over completely to 2000/XP within the year, a working Wine install for 5.1 might not work for whatever comes next.