Blast from the past

When I was trying to cleanup the mess of my home folder a few days ago I discovered an archive named Cycas4p2.

This was an early pre-realease of CYCAS 4 back on March 2010. Since there are no more news about this release and the project seems discontinued or frozen, I really like the idea of posting some screenshots of this.
This pre-realease can only draw lines and boxes but can load sucessfully older cycas sample files.

DraftSight for Linux update will be available on July

An update for the Linux version of DraftSight will be available on July.
DraftSight is an AutoCAD-like 2D CAD from Dassault.
The first Beta version of DraftSight Linux was released on March.
The updated version will continue being marked as "Beta".
The first beta version of DraftSight Linux works really good.
I hope that this update will fix some minor bugs but I don't expect radical improvements.
I also hope that the final version will be available soon.

GNOME 3 and DraftSight

I was very curious if an existing proprietary CAD program integrates well with the new GNOME 3 environment. So I created a Fedora 15 LiveUSB stick and I installed DraftSight on it.

As you can see the new GTK+ 3 theme cannot be applied correctly on a Qt app like DraftSight. However the application runs great and works well with the new environment. The right click--> "Open with DraftSight" option works with Nautilus and the .dwg and .dxf files have icons with the DS logo.

Several different ways to do the same thing

You may have noticed that,while using a CAD program, there are several ways to get to the same result. Also different programs use different techniques to get to the same result. What's the point of this post ? To prove that CAD is much more than a single program or only one drawing technique. Let's create a very simple 3D object, a pipe with 100mm height,outer diameter 20mm, inner diameter 15mm, by several different ways and programs.

Pin FreeCAD development version to the Unity Launcher

When you test the development version of FreeCAD on Ubuntu 11.04 you will probably need to pin it to the Unity Launcher. Unfortunately when you open FreeCAD from Nautilus, the right click--> Keep in Launcher option doesn't work.
The FreeCAD icon will be kept in Launcher,
but you cannot start the program by clicking it.
So how can you start FreeCAD from the Unity Launcher ?
Here is a simple workaround: