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Two quick bits of news on Bricscad.

Some localized versions are available since October 5th. In addition to English, you can now get Bricscad in Czech, French, German, Italian and Spanish.

On the Bricscad (Linux) forum, many users have expressed concerns over the last few months to the fact that there was no official news about a Linux version of Bricscad Pro. On September 21st, Mr. Erik De Keyser, Bricsys' CEO answered them on the forum :

Hi All,

Let's take away a few doubts.
We certainly will produce a Bricscad Pro for LINUX  including the ACIS engine for 3D modeling. Rendering will also be supported. Favorable upgrade paths of course will be available. Regarding BRX - we are exploring the possibilities: the how's and the when's. Please give us some time to come up with the answers. Hope this makes it absolutely clear that we are serious about Bricscad for LINUX.

Note : BRX is Bricsys' own software development kit.

A long long time ago, the only way to install software on Linux was to build (compile) from sources, using commands typed in a console. Linux has evolved tremendously since. Major Linux distributions (distros for short) now offer user-friendly UIs to install software as easily as in Windows. On Ubuntu, the Software Center is the easiest, but it is limited to free and open source software. Commercial apps are not available (but this soon may change, since the Ubuntu 10.10 release, coming October 10th will offer a commercial software repository).

On Ubuntu, programs which are not part of the official repositories can also be installed effortlessly in an UI called the Package Manager, provided they are supplied as Debian packages. These are file archives with the *.deb extension. A double click on the downloaded file will launch the Package Installer. All that is needed is to click on the "Install Package" button, then enter the system password, and the package will be installed with no further step.

Unfortunately, on Ubuntu 10.04 64 bits, ARES Commander Edition won't install this way, because Graebert has not provided a 64-bit package, only a 32-bit one. I get the following error shown in the screenshot, and you can see that the "Install Package" button is inactive.

Force installation of the 32-bit package on Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit

To install 32-bit software on Ubuntu 64-bit, you need to install the ia32-libs runtime libraries and the util-linux package. (Both links are based on the apturl protocol: simply click them to install the packages directly from your browser. Ain't that cool?)

Then, we need to use the terminal (available through the Applications > Accessories > Terminal menu). Enter the following command:

sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture [package's name]

Where [package's name] should be replaced with the file name (without brackets), including the complete file path. But here's a tip: instead, from your file manager window, simply drag & drop the file on the terminal window: the complete path with file name will be added automatically.

You then only need press Enter to execute the command.

As a rule, I dislike using the terminal, and I think that too many blogs and forum posts use terminal commands to install software or do other tasks. It gives the idea to people unfamiliar with Ubuntu that entering commands in a console is mandatory. This is not the case! Most of the tasks can usually be done using a user-friendly interface. But in this very specific case, I wasn't able to find one.

Tip based on the Ubuntu-fr French Community's Documentation.

Well, I can't say that this blog has seen much activity in the past few months! It's not for lack of subjects to write about. My interests somehow shifted elsewhere. I spent some of my freetime on other projects, like contributing to the Ubuntu French Community's wiki.

With the fall season upon us, I've decided to infuse some life back to this blog.

Am I still convinced that a blog dedicated to CAD on Linux is worthy of taking its small share of the Internet? Yes, definitely. While I was away, I didn't stop testing CAD software running on Linux, and I'm eager to write about them.

Will I ever finish the 2-parter review of PythonCAD? To be honest, I kind of lost my motivation on that one. On one thing, I found this software frustrating to use, and on another, it's a basic 2D drafting program. I'm mostly interested in 3D CAD. We'll see.

So, this blog will very soon cease to be almost exclusively about Bricscad (finally)!

Big news from Bricsys today: Bricscad for Linux just went from Alpha to Beta status. The 10.4.4 release is available for testing here. A banner with download link is now on Bricsys' English homepage (the other languages pages have not been updated yet). The move to beta means it is possible to file support requests to report bugs.

Some things to note with this release:

• Printing is now available
• Improved Debian/Ubuntu install package: it now support 64-bit architecture
• The .tgz archive was corrected as well
• The 'Help' command now opens the online help in an external browser
• Some issues still remain; Bricsys recommends that beta-testers should regularly check the Release Notes page for an updated list of known issues.

It's been clear for some time that the "early Q2 final release" announced back in February wouldn't be met. With this move to beta, I think we may be looking at a final release by end of summer (which is what was told an eager customer by a French vendor, a short while ago).

Update: according to Bricsys' press release, the first commercial version is to be released at the end of June 2010. Thanks to "Visitor" (who left a comment) for pointing that out.

This is my tenth post, and my first reviewing a free and open source CAD package. Considering that the About page says I'm a "staunch supporter of FOSS", well it was about time! Since writing about the installation process took longer than anticipated, I decided to do a two-parter: next part will be about running and using the software.

PythonCAD is a simple - I'd even say rudimentary - 2D CAD app which is programmed, as one might guess, in Python. It's a free project licenced under the GPL. One of its goals is to provide a scriptable application.

The project was initially developed continuously from 2002 to 2007, with no less than 36 releases in that span, then it was abandoned. In May 2009, the project was picked up by a new maintainer, how a few months after published a new release, in Dec. 2009.

This 37th and latest version is still a development release. It can be downloaded from SourceForge here as a .tar.gz archive.

(Please note: there is also a pythoncad package available in the Debian and Ubuntu repositories, which would be a lot more easier, and really quick to install through the Synaptic package manager or the Ubuntu Software Centre. But since this package is built from the DS1-R35 release from way back in 2006, I chose to install the latest R37 from the project's website; it supposedly eliminates bugs and adds a few more features.)