Gentle persons: From time to time we talk about 2D CAD systems, aka drafting systems.
Dassault Systemes, a major international player in the CAD world, known for CATIA, Solid Works, and product life-cycle management software, among other things, has released a public-beta version of a drafting system it calls DraftSight. A major feature is the tight compatibility of DraftSight with Autodesk's DWG and DXF file formats. Indeed, it is being advertised as "a better way to read, write, and share DWG files." This is not open software but it is free to use on an individual basis. It was developed for MS-Windows systems. However, I downloaded the 42MB file and installed first on my WindowsXP machine and then on the same machine running Ubuntu 9.10 (using wine1.0.1). It seems to run fine on both although there is a GUI sluggishness (nice pun, huh?) in Ubuntu that I believe is due to the crappy graphics-board driver I'm using in Linux. DraftSight appears to be a full-featured drafting system, neither cripple ware nor viewer only. There is a software license activation that is very unobtrusive---I didn't even notice it. I suppose it ran in the background when I acknowledged the license statement during installation. Whatever it is, it worked both in Windows and in Ubuntu. It's possible that the activation requires an Internet connection. I don't know because I was already connected to the Internet at the time. It's always possible that Dassault Systemes will change its marketing strategy as DraftSight nears version 1.0 but for now this deal is hard to turn down. I have no connection with Dassault Systemes or any other software vendor, nor am I particularly interested in 2D CAD, but I like exploring what's out there, and I thought some of you would like to know. See http://www.3ds.com/products/draftsight Regards, Kent ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ThinkGeek and WIRED's GeekDad team up for the Ultimate GeekDad Father's Day Giveaway. ONE MASSIVE PRIZE to the lucky parental unit. See the prize list and enter to win: http://p.sf.net/sfu/thinkgeek-promo _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
