DraftSight on CentOS 6.2 (32bit)

I was very curious if DraftSight can work with RHEL clones like CentOS or Scientific Linux. So I decided to test the installation of DraftSight on CentOS 6.2.

I am not familiar with rpm-based distros and as Ubuntu user I had difficulties to make DraftSight to work with CentOS. Like the latest OpenSUSE, CentOS requires additional repositories to be enabled in order to install DraftSight. Unfortunately I am not sure if all the repositories I used were necessary and the use of all these 3d party repositories caused problems in update manager because they contain same packages.

• My workaround

I added the repositories  RPMforge and RPM Fusion in my system. These are repositories with some commonly used extra content. However with these repositories enabled the DraftSight installation failed because a dependency wasn't satisfied. So I manually installed this package and after that the installation was successful.

I believe that is is not the recommended workaround, even if it was successful, for two reasons:

• I am not sure if RPMForge and RPM Fusion are necessary for the DraftSight's installation.
• The library I installed manually is contained to another repository, ATrpms. This repository might be more useful because it contains also Nvidia's binary driver.

If you add all the above repositories  (RPMforge, RPM Fusion and ATrpms) you will have problems with your update manager. ( The solution is probably here but I didn't test it).

 DraftSight on CentOS

So my recommendation is to enable only the ATrpms repository. Probably all that you need is here. If you experience any issues (unsatisfied dependencies) try to enable the other repos as well. A quick and easy workaround if you experience problems with your update manager, is to disable the 3rd party repositories after the installation of DraftSight.

CentOS is probably the best choice for a zero-cost, long-living Linux CAD workstation.

CentOS and other RHEL clones are ideal for workstations because they are stable, mature fast, and with long maintenance cycle. However you can find distros that are much more easier to use and configure.