DWG on Linux

[michael.12445]

I saw some interest in this here a while ago...

AFAIK, Autodesk has not, as yet, chosen to develop any of their software for the Linux platform. However, a Belgian company called Bricscad (www.bricscad.com) has.

Bricscad is a member of the Intellicad Technology Consortium, an organization that develops DWG-compatible CAD software. They have issued a beta version of their latest release (Bricscad V5) that runs on Linux.

I've tried it. It runs under WINE, which is a method of getting Windows programs to run under Linux (some people have made AutoCAD run under WINE as well, but only with a lot of tweaking and limited success). The beta is very slow at screen redraws, but is otherwise quite stable. They even got printing to work, which amazed me.

They told me they're working on getting a more reasonably speedy product for the official release, and also that there may be a future release that runs natively on Linux (i.e., not under WINE). Their site says that they are aiming at the end of the second quarter of 2004 for the official commercial release, and that it should be priced comparably to their Windows product, which sells for between $225 - $450 depending on the version.

Michael Evans
Togawa & Smith, Inc.

[Beth Powell]

I have also seen that there is a dwg program available for Linux. I don't remember if it's the same one as you mentioned, but I found it when typing CAD+Linux when doing a search a while back.

I would love to see ACAD support for Linux, but unfortunately I don't think there's much of a chance of that happening unless there are a lot of wish list items added for that. As it is, Adesk tries to quickly drop O.S.'s and older versions as quickly as possible so they don't have to spend time and money supporting as much. Just a business decision.

I personally would love to drop MS totally. As it is, I have dropped IE and Outlook and am a lover and promoter personally for Mozilla, Firefox, and Thunderbird. All are free downloads. I switched to these about six months ago. I regularly run spybot once a week. Since switching I have yet to come up with anything in spybot, have zero popups, have reduced my spam. What more?

I plan on my next home system to be dual boot with Linux being my primary OS and having the optional of XP solely for the use of ACAD.

[Glenn Pope]

I came across this the other day. PowerCAD for Linux. (http://powercad.sourceforge.net/) It's in the very beginning of development. Definitely something to keep an eye on though.

And if it ever gets finished, the price will be FREE 8-)

[michael.12445]

I would love to see ACAD support for Linux, but unfortunately I don't think there's much of a chance of that happening unless there are a lot of wish list items added for that. As it is, Adesk tries to quickly drop O.S.'s and older versions as quickly as possible so they don't have to spend time and money supporting as much. Just a business decision.


I suppose the directors of Autodesk have some sort of profit-loss calculations to back up their decisions, but there seem to be a number of us winding up on the wrong side of those equations. We are using AutoCAD 2002 and have already decided never to upgrade it, because some of our consultants are using the orphaned AutoCAD 14. The inability of 2004 and 2005 to save files in R14 format is a deal-killer, pure and simple. Yesterday the boss was asking around among the staff about BIM-based software as opposed to AutoCAD. After a fairly comprehensive discussion that included Revit and Architectural Desktop, he decided to look further into Archicad and the drafting capabilities of Form-Z. What steered him away from Revit and Architectural Desktop was the fact that they are Autodesk products.

I also have to wonder about throwing all one's eggs into the M$-Windows basket, and ignoring Linux, OS X, etc. You mention Mozilla's Firefox and Thunderbird, which I use, too.
It seems those programs were released right around the time that a bunch of security holes were showing up in IE, and there's been something of a stampede away from IE as a result. I believe I read yesterday that M$ is now going to make IE patches available only to Windows XP users, which should only add fuel to that fire.

So you have to wonder...

Michael Evans