Pro/Engineer Coming to Linux

PotatoHead writes " Parametric Technologies Corporation (PTC) announced in a recent press release, a Linux port of their flagship modeling product Pro Engineer. HP will be the preferred partner for the Linux platform release. This is pretty big news for the engineering and product design crowd folks. There must be some fairly credible requests coming in for this to happen."

Comments

This is very cool

[SquadBoy]

when I used to work at PTC customers where always asking about this and of course since it is working closely with HP odds are it will be Debian that will be officialy supported with it. There is a *huge* market for this. I'm sure many of my old friends are *very* happy.

Good, that's one of my only reasons to stay MS!

[Dr_Marvin_Monroe]

This is great news, the engineering crowd has been stuck with MS for a while now. The Linux CAD area is one place where we could use some support. This is not a slam on the CAD stuff that's out there, but Pro-E is in a different league.

Pro-E is also VERY expensive when compared with the other CAD packages though....I'd really like to see Solidworks for Linux. I could TOTALY walk away from MS if that happened. I imagine that there are a lot of engineering operations that could do it too. All Linux workstations, no MS anywhere from the engineering office all the way out to the production floor.

I've recently written to the folks at Solidworks too, sort of the "....I'm really interested and would buy seats now if I had the opportunity..." No reply.

How about a really "kick-ass" engineering document control program to go with that?...I was just thinking about that last night, something to compete with Agile and the like.....

Linux is becoming the default in ASIC engineering

[TechyImmigrant]

I have been in ASIC engineering for the past 11 years. I have seen things moving towards Linux as the underlying OS for the past 2-3 years.

It appears to go hand in hand with the fastest uniprocessor platforms looking fast compared to the fastest uniprocessor suns.

The software we use is very expensive and generally compute intensive. So it pays to run it on the fastest hardware and it pays to buy the fastest hardware when it is the cheapest. The only exceptions are tools that require 64 bit addresses to permit enough memory to be installed (E.G. IC layout). Sun still wins there.

When PCs are both the fastest and cheapest and Unix is the operating system of choice for engineers and Linux is both free and good, the preference is obvious.

We pretty much will not buy software that does not run on Linux and the ASIC tool vendors know it.

The same market forces seem to apply in here mechanical engineering.

Maybe a bit late for PTC...

[Papineau]

ProE started on the Unix platform, then almost totally migrated to NT (and 2k). But they kept the same kind of interface, which needed some time to get used to (all menus in a single window, the next of which overlaps the previous...). They had the potential to really take the market with their parametric technology, which was a lot more advanced than what AutoCad could (can) offer. But then some other ones rose...
Personnally, I'm leaning towards SolidWorks. The licensing costs are smaller than those of the competition, and it's very pleasant to work with. Very Windows-centric, but the interface is fast to get accustomed to.
And it impossible to pass by Catia V5. The precedent versions were almost exclusively Unix-based, but they also made the switch to NT. The interface is really nice (reminiscent of XP, but a few years before). Pleasant to use, but V5 is still being developped, so the stability on the latest release is not always top notch.
There's also Autodesk's Inventor, although I never used it personally.

Of course, then there's the support for third-parties modules. This can hurt initialy the introduction of a new platform (CAD or HW).

Kudos to PTC for bringing their product to Linux. I know there's been some people asking them to do it for a few years now. But one has to wonder if it's because they feel some pressure to maintain their share of the market.

Re:Maybe a bit late for PTC...

[puetzc]

There is a ProE forum at www.prouser.org. Mentions of Linux always raise a lot of "Cool - when" responses. Most of the major CAD packages have come from either a UNIX or main frame background, as PC's have only had the required horsepower for 5-6 years. This is a market where $1000+ graphic cards are still discussed, and were the debate of how much memory is needed in a new workstation starts at 1G, with questions as to whether this is enough or not (NOT, if you are doing serious work on large assemblies.) The advantages of better memory and swap handling, better network stacks and stability keep SUN in business, as a PC with Windows maxes out at 1.6G of RAM (you can add more, but it won't be used). If you need 4G to do the job, you need UNIX.

The discussions abour SolidWorks and AutoCAD have their place, but putting a whole tractor in electronic form (I work for Deere & Co), with every bend in the sheet metal and bump on the transmission housing, requires more that those products can deliver. Is it worth it? It is when all pieces fit the first time, with no reworking of tools or expensive trial pieces for fit-up checks only.

While ProE is far from perfect, it is closer than the other tools I have tried. I was certainly sad the day I lost HP-UX and moved to WindowsNT, however. Windows2000 hasn't eased my pain.

I am a Linux user at home, and would jump at the chance to use it at work for ProE. I don't know the the IS group in a large corporation will be able to be that open minded, but I certainly welcome the change to give it a try.

Re:Wine, perhaps?

[SoftwareJanitor]

Why oh why has Autocad not been released for Linux?

AutoCAD used to be available for a number of the proprietary *nixes (Solaris, SGI IRIX, HP/UX, etc) back in the Release 10, 11, 12 (and early R13) days. People I used to know that worked at AutoDesk used to make sort of veiled hints that Microsoft put some kind of pressure on them to quit supporting alternative platforms. More or less what they were saying is that AutoDesk was told if didn't quit supporting non-Microsoft platforms that Microsoft would enter the CAD market (possibly by buying up one of AutoDesk's competitors), or at least announce that they were going to, and that would kill AutoDesk by "giving away" the product. But of course nobody in those days would dare come right out and say something like that.

ProE taking themselves out of the research market

[gevmage]

It's great that after several years of using the excuse of "we don't what Linux distribution to support", they're finally making the port to a Linux based OS.

Unfortunately, this may be too little too late as far as academic users of the software are concerned. A couple of years ago, ProE files generated by the education version of the software started to not be capatible with the full version software, cutting off university research groups that wanted to be able to design things with ProE and have their files merged with bigger systems.

I'm part of a research group that was fighting for our research collaboration with several other universities and national lab to use ProE for the design and integration of the sub-systems. However we lost the fight when it was realized that the educational version (cheap at $5k per seat) wasn't capatible with the super-duper version that the lab has.

On a similar note...

[CAIMLAS]

does anyone know if this software is functional for civil/environmental engineering-type drafting? (Drainage systems, bridges, feed lots, that sort of thing). I've been looking for such a linux solution due to the immense time investment that Windows takes to administer, and am wondering if there is a product that is similar in feature and similar in function to AutoCAD 2000 (due to the monkey-like nature of most of the engineering technicals employed at the company I work for, it's necessary to have something that will not cost a lot to retrain them on.)

Sorry if it's a bit incoherrent, it's been a long night and I'm exhausted.