Two quick tips for the new DraftSight version

After installing the latest DraftSight I did some quick changes that might be helpful.

DraftSight and 64bit Linux

I have decided to write this little comment because of the great interest of people to run the current versions of DraftSight, which are 32bit only, in 64bit Linux installations. First if you want to run DraftSight in a Linux box 32bit OS is preferable for some reasons, but if you continue wanting  a 64bit OS you have to keep in mind some difficulties:

1. Do not use unsupported distros, different packaging may cause problems that are more difficult to solve
2. Linux has various package manages which may have different behavior. For example dpkg doesn't add automatically 32-bit dependencies but yast does
3. Ubuntu 11.04 has a bug that breaks the installation of 32bit packages in a 64bit system. There are various workarounds but I think that, update your dpkg package via apt-pinning, is the best.
4. A quick tip is to start DraftSight for first time via terminal, so you can see any error messages. You can start DraftSight with the command

/opt/dassault-systemes/draftsight/bin/DraftSight 

Little things that make linux powerful and effective

 Linux is famous about its fancy Window managers. Compiz, Kwin and e17 are some of them with different capabilities each one. But these fancy things are only for fun??

Back to reality

After some days without PC and Internet, but with a lot of sun and sea, I have returned home. Well I lost some interesting news like the new DraftSight release, but my batteries are fully charged. Time for changes on this blog I think... I have some ideas in mind but nothing is certain yet. I will post more in a few weeks, probably before autumn.

Update for TeighaViewer available

A new version 3.05.0 of TeighaViewer,  a free CAD files viewer from ODA, is available for download.
This version has some fixes but continues to be buggy.
Despite the bugs, it deserves some space in your HDD, only for the great dwg/dxf support and the capabilities of saving in plenty versions of these formats.

Both 32bit .deb and .rpm files are available here 

New FreeCAD module

A new module named "Ship" is available for FreeCAD. It aims to be a user-friendly module that will add ship modelling functionality on FreeCAD. I downloaded it and installed it after some tricks (I had to define the correct installation path in the makefile) into my FreeCAD dev installation but I didn't make it work
(Or I didn't understand how it works).

Enabling Global menu support for DraftSight on Ubuntu 11.04

A few days ago reader Toni left me a comment asking if I know any way to enable global menu support for DraftSight on Ubuntu 11.04.
I am an Ubuntu user and I use Natty as one of my OSes ( My other OSes are Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and Debian Wheezy ). I have never thought to enable global menu on DraftSight before. I use DraftSight and I find it great but  I never missed this feature.