Townsville Linux Users Group

Being that I work full time for a local engineering consultant as a design drafter and do contractors shop drawings from home at night I rely on Autocad fairly heavily. I made the move to Linux 2 years or more ago as my primary desktop but had to keep the other OS around so that I could use Autocad. I have been using a virtual machine for this so that I can use cad whenever I had the need.

When I made the move I tried varying CAD solutions for Linux but the differences between what they had to offer and what I use every day were too great except for one Progesoft. Progesoft was based on Intellicad but the company had hired a Linux programmer to get the program running in wine. This was short lived as the beta trials came to a screeching halt when the programmer up and left.

Leading up to Christmas 2010 I came across a new to the market CAD program for Linux written from the ground up to run on Linux not in wine. I decided to take it for a spin. Much to my surprise I was almost looking at the Autocad interface, command line and all. I became very excited, and began to think that I may finally be able to rid myself of the other OS.

Well the program was very good. It has pretty much all the same options as Autocad does. There where a couple of little things with tracking and snaps that I discovered in my testing but nothing that couldn't be worked around. I rang the developer and spoke with him about how Linux was in desperate need of this program and I was pleasantly surprised with the functionality. We spoke for a while and one concern that I raised was if the addons would run on the linux version without modification like it does on the windows version. This was to be the biggest draw back to the program thus far. The people that wrote the addons would need to recompile against the different libraries. A few have already done this but the ones that I would need to be using are unfortunately not willing to travel this road.

I have contacted one company in particular and while he is watching the Linux CAD movement he is not currently willing to place time, money and resources in that market. He tells me that he will continue to monitor this area and when there appears to be a big enough market he will be bringing his product into play.

Bricscad is definitely a positive step forward for Linux users in the CAD world. It is ready for most challenges today and will only get better as time goes on. There are addons already ported to run on Bricscad. So if you have the need for a CAD program for Linux give Bricscad a try. I think you will pleasantly surprised