Linux (Ubuntu) for engineers...

[htoerrin]

Just a couple of programs not mentioned yet:

octave: A matlab clone. I have never used Matlab, so I can't compare, but octave seemes quite useful.

qcad: Seemes to be a quite reasonable 2d cad program.

eagle: (www.cadsoftusa.com) Electronic schematics and layout. Limited free version.

[Peter76]

Have a look at wings3d for ( duh 3d modelling. It's in the repo's

[cb951303]

I reccomend www.octave.org which is a matlab like dev environment by GNU. It's a very complete package.

[cotcot]

If you look for an CAD program "QCAD" will do. I have checked its compatibilty with Autocad and that is quite good.
I am currently learning Blender3D. Nice tool for 3D.
I do not really feel the need for a separate engineers section (although I am a chemical engineer).

[scpike]

Maple runs natively under linux, its pretty cool

[cb951303]

blender3d or wings3d are not good for engineering. A 3d CAD would be more efficient ( maybe at least with some basic physics simulations )
Unfortunatly QCAD is 2d only

[Hitchhiker427]

yeah, that is one thing missing. I haven't been able to find a decent Autodesk Inventor or Solidworks clone yet. Until then, I'll just dual-boot and use the real things in Windows.

[apolyak]

look at:
- bc - An arbitrary precision calculator language. Uses C-like language. Search Google for bc, there are a lot functions written for bc. There is a bug in if - else statement: ad ' \ ' after if closing '}'
if (x < i){
do something;
}\ /* add \ after } */
else{
do something;
}

- gnuplot
- SwitcherCad III -> is a high performance Spice III simulator, schematic capture and waveform viewer with enhancements and models for easing the simulation. http://www.linear.com/company/software.jsp. Runs under wine very well.

[ReverseEngineered]

I'm a fourth-year studying Electrical Engineer, and there are several programs I use.

Latex is quite common, even among our entire university. Rather than distribute the actual source itself, many people convert the dvi's to pdf's, either directly (pdflatex) or using a simple script (dvips and ps2pdf). Our University has made this standard practice for the entire faculty (including giving workshops on how to do it) and the result has been clear, standardize, universally-accessible tests and assignments; definitely a nice touch.

I use Unix versions of both the commercial Matlab and Maple. Aside from their horrible interfaces (as far as I know both use Motif), they function almost identically to their Windows counterparts. There are also open source equivalents of both (Octave and Maxima). I have yet to try Maxima. Octave is nice, but doesn't quite have the same functionality as Matlab (several of the more basic toolboxes either have parts missing or with limited functionality, uses gnuplot for output so can't perform many of the same system-design methods like root locus very well).

Dia works very well for diagrams (such as UML in computer science). Only problems I've ever had is intermixing .dia files between Linux and Cygwin versions (font sizes exploded sporadically). I have yet to see a good Linux equivalent of AutoCAD, though my searches have been limited. Anybody comment on this?

My biggest stumbling block as been in the actual electronics arena. EDA (schematic capture, simulation, PCB layouts, etc) is severely limited. gEDA is in the works, but it's no where near Multisim or CircuitMaker. From what I know CircuitMaker will work under WINE, but last I checked both old (Electronics Workbench) and new (Multisim) versions of the Multisim products don't work properly (load, but the UI has fatal bugs). Eagle is a great program (though REALLY weird to learn at first), but the limited free version is almost useless for anything but the most simple projects, and don't even bother trying to pirate it.

All in all, most anything you need for Engineering can be found under Linux (after all, many scientists write their in-house tools in Unix), though it may not be as refined and as powerful as the commercial Windows offerings. I suppose the old adage is still true--you get what you pay for.

[bernardfrancois]

Dia works very well for diagrams (such as UML in computer science).

For UML diagrams, you can also use umbrello.
I used it to draw an ERD for a database modelling project (though I had to add symbols for primary keys using the gimp).

- SwitcherCad III -> is a high performance Spice III simulator, schematic capture and waveform viewer with enhancements and models for easing the simulation. http://www.linear.com/company/software.jsp. Runs under wine very well.

There are other spice simulators as well. Spice started as a free unix program, later several GUI's were made (there are commercial ones an non-commercial ones, for both unix and windows). I didn't search very far for a good one, since I have only seen the basics of electronics.