I am a control engineering student in Brazil and have a similar problem. I
don't know anybody in my course (save some professors from the computing
department, not engineering) that uses free software or free OS's here. I
have a course that demands to learn AutoCAD. When I did that I used Ubuntu
with wine to run it but since all we did was 2D house architecture and
electrical wiring I think LibreCAD would suffice though I did not know it by
then.
In the labs everybody uses MatLab. I am learning to use SAGE (free software
multi-purpose math software, aiming to be a complete clone of several math
tools of various purposes). Hopefully that will suffice but I'm not taking
classes that use it this semester.
The real deal, however, is Proteus for circuit simulation. Does anyone knows
a viable alternative for it?
