Gentle persons: I quite understand the desire to find CAD software that (1) is free as in beer and (2) runs directly in Linux. I yield to no one in my ardor for open source in general and GNU/Linux in particular. As I grow older, however, I find that pragmatism is overtaking idealism. With respect to CAD, two other characteristics are becoming paramount: (1) how easy is it for me to use a particular program without fuss and bother to design precise mechanical parts and (2) how easy is it for me to extract the design in a usable format. With respect to these characteristics, and especially the latter, I have blown hot and cold over various open-source CAD applications.
Let me discuss a alternative that is not open source but can be free to the user. In the MS Windows domain, there is a very competent commercial 3D solid modeller called Alibre Design, for which there is a free lite version called Alibre Design Express (see http://www.alibre.com for details). In the years before I retired, I was an early adopter of Alibre Design to create some mechanical parts and assemblies in an underfunded project because the package was much less expensive than its competitors like SolidWorks, SolidEdge, ProEngineer, or Autodesk Inventor for similar features. The free Alibre Design Express has some restrictions, of course, but it retains the good user interface and the ability to export 3D models in well-known formats like IGES, SAT, and STEP that can be post-processed easily. (For that matter, if you've got the $$, Alibre has recently released a companion CAM package and also a woodworking package. They also have various offers for "at home" use of their non-free packages that I haven't explored.) I run Alibre Design Express on a Windows XP box to design parts. I haven't tried to run it over WINE on a Linux box, but then the el-cheapo boxes I have running Linux have neither the horsepower or the graphics capability needed anyway. Although my Windows XP box is reasonably well equipped and set up to dual boot into several different Linux distributions, it seems pointless to try running Alibre Design Express within a virtual Windows XP environment in Linux for the obvious reason that it's already running fine in Windows XP. Naturally, your situation may be entirely different but if you haven't tried this product I think you should. Regards, Kent PS - Leaving aside its user interface, SALOME GEOM has very good data import/export capability because it was intended to support "interoperability between CAD modeling and computation software," its internal geometry functions are excellent, and, wonder of wonders, it exposes all its functions via a Python API, so I'm thinking seriously about how I could use it for script-driven as opposed to gui-driven design. Alibre Design and its commercial competitors expose a good deal of their functionality using MS Windows technologies such as COM and .NET, so one could drive them via Python as well, but somehow that's not as alluring to me. PPS - FreeCAD (no, not that one, the other one; see http://juergen-riegel.net/FreeCAD/Docu/index.php?title=Main_Page) might become the open-source 3D modeling application of choice, but it's still very early in its development and many claimed features appear to be planned rather than actual. The home page is peppered with phrases like "will have..." and "will be...." PPPS - I have no connection with Alibre or any other CAD-application provider. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
