DesignCAD 3D Runs on Wine on Linux!

[vturbine]

Man I've been trying to make this happen for several years. I even became a Wine maintainer for this program to try to get it going. I tried everything, native DLLs from Windows installs, contacting others who I found through Google who had worked on the problem, Monitoring system calls in DesignCad. Submitting Wine bug reports. Everything I could think of. Always in the end I had to rate the program as "Garbage" on the WineDb

This week I finally succeeded on running DesignCAD 3D with a new version of Wine (1.1.24)! It did require modifying the normal kernel module load in Puppy Linux 4.1.2 and blacklisting the nv module and substituting proprietary NVIDIA drivers. But anyway, the damn thing just up and ran! I couldn't believe it. And stable as heck! I rated it Gold. You can see my comments on the Wine App. DB.

Most anyone can do it with an NVIDIA card on any flavor of Linux if they use the proprietary video card drivers. The big problem appears to have been that OpenGL wasn't implemented sufficiently in the stock Linux nv video card driver.

Other cards will probably work as well, but of course, I couldn't test them.

Why is this a big deal to me? Well, 3D CAD is EXPENSIVE generally, and Linux native 3D versions are pretty much nonexistent at low cost on a professional level. Except possibly for CollabCAD. But that one is still under development.

DesignCAD on the other hand is pretty reasonable in price. Even new it is under $150. And according to many the older versions are superior to the newer, which were re-written to suit Vista, and still apparently have problems. So If you are interested, check Ebay for older versions. Versions 15 through 17 are considered very good and stable, and have almost all of the features of the later versions.

The big problem was that it only ran on Windows.

Not any more!

DesignCAD 17 running under Wine on Puppy Linux

[vturbine]

I found the solution on my own computer by running in a terminal:

Code: Select all

glxgears

If it's available on your Linux install, you will see an animation of two gears running, and an indication of your framerate. I had a somewhat jerky animation and the framerate was only about 350 fps. That sounds like a lot, but it isn't for a good graphics card that features hardware acceleration/rendering. To verify this I entered in the terminal:

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glxinfo | grep rendering

My terminal replied:

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direct rendering: No

After removing module nv and running the NVIDIA driver install, I ran glxgears again and got a framerate of 1300 fps! glxinfo reported that direct rendering was now enabled. The gears ran smoothly, and so did DesignCAD!

(Ignore the Code Select All tag above -- looks like a bug in the phpBB pulse-jets forum software when the code tag is applied)

[vturbine]

BY the way, DesingCad will read and write .dwg, .dxf, and IGES format drawings, among many others. It should therfore be able to interchange with AutoCAD, CollabCAD, and Salome Meca FEA suite.