AutoCad in Ubuntu

[kumakun]

I have a friend that I've just about got convinced to make The Switch, when all of a sudden he throws a stumbling block at me. "Will AutoCad still work?" My quick and dirty answer is "With WINE, probably..." Does anyone know if AutoCad runs natively, or if there's a linux equivalent that will read and write to AutoCad format, Ala OO.o?

And barring that, was the answer I gave remotely correct?

/Kuma

[sonny]

Well I think this (http://www.ribbonsoft.com/qcad.html) can help... as for reading the AutoCAD file format I really doubt it, but you can go trhough the specs of it.

[Burgundavia]

There is also pythoncad, but I don't think that it is very advanced.

Corey

[poofyhairguy]

A: Good answer.

B: Mention VMware.

[sonny]

I think VMware is more likely to be used by a company... I'm sure he can try that; if he is willing to spent 200 dollars to buy the software... I guess that if you can't manage to make autocad usable through wine or cedega or crossover (I say cedega 'cuz a friend of mine says that winrar runs faster in it than it does in wine) he has to make it with qcad.

That is one of the most dificult parts when switching to Linux, the specialize software, is not that there's any to make things like you do in winxp, is just that if you have a bunch of files with some specialize-closed-source-commercial software you're practically doomed to live with it... unless you don't need those files anymore, wich I guess is not the case of your friend.

Anyway, make him try qcad or pythoncad or something he likes... but there's always some point when he is going to miss autocad, unless you've done a great brainwash :grin: ... he'll miss autocad for some reason so you better find the way to make him feel confortable with the software you give him.

[BAshworth]

R14 will work with Wine, but 2000 and above don't. (on purpose)

Intellicad runs just fine though.