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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."
I thought Pro/E was simply a file format standard for drafting and design. I also thought the standard was open. Why hasn't an open source project undergone making a CAD program that read/wrote Pro/E files? Is the need that little?
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
This is top-notch software. Well, PRO/Engineer is, anyway. The last shop I worked at used Cadence but we had a lot of PRO/E CAD people who had come from Lockheed-Martin.
OTOH, this is not cheap software. Usually several thousand $$ a seat.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
So, they are officially supporting Linux as a target platform, because they recognize it can have a lower TCO.
Which is true, of course, if they have UNIX expertise in-house. MCSEs are a dime a dozen, but good UNIX admins are quite expensive. If you go the consulting route, you get screwed with huge fees. If you train your personell, you get screwed with long courses and a decent change they simply won't get it.
Then again, if you have a competent staff or a big budget, *nix all the way. I know firsthand that the grass really is greener on the *nix side of the fence, but sometimes that's not feasible for large corporations. (Besides, many corporations are brainless and/or inflexible, and won't switch away from their Novell file servers, Lotus Notes 2.0, and NT 3.51, but they have bigger problems.)
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.....
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.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
For all you non-mechanical engineer types, Pro/Engineer is a 3-d modeling tool. The other big ones out there are SolidWorks (which is hugely popular, mostly due to its lower cost, but similar quality) and at a lower scale, AutoCad Mechanical Desktop/Inventor.
As an aside, Cadence generally doesn't do mechanical modeling software. They do PCB design, schematic entry, simulation and of course IC design and verification.
This is news, but for most Linux users, forget about buying Pro/E. It costs big time - and the companies that use Pro/E already can afford bigtime boxes (Sparcs, etc) to run them on. Now if SolidWorks were to push into the Linux arena, things would start to get interesting...
apt-get install proeng. . .oh wait, they're going to charge MONEY for this aren't they? Hopefully if a few big-name apps get people to accept buying software for linux, we'll see a lot more.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
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.
Why is it that this gets modded up? Good MS admins are just as expensive as good unix admins, there's just more MS admins because of the way that MS built their software. When the only way to recover a computer is by reinstalling all the software, then yeah, you are going to NEED a bunch of disk monkeys to run around with CDs and hard drive images. But a good unix admin can do everything from remote, usually even if the user has hosed their system. (Thanks to a security model that is actually implemented!)
Yes I am replying to myself.
I thought that Pro E had already been ported to Linux because of something I read on SDRC's chat board.
Although I'm not a regular Pro-E user, Its great news for Mechanical Engineers / Designers. In my opinion, the greatest advantage of running CAD software on a *NIX box is that I can more easily write scripts to do my work. PERL is right there at the command line, and makes it easy to dump a list of 3D point coordinates into a macro for creating or modifying parts. Yes, you can do the same stuff in windows, but I think we can all agree it's easier with Unix.
Congrats Parametric Technology!
I have worked in the HMI/Systems Intergration Field, and there are really only two products used for design. Autocad for 2d work, and Pro/Engineer for 3d and serious acurate 2d work. The funny thing is, you can download a version of the package that is 100% free for nothing.... unless you don't want like 250 megs. True, you could order the cd for like 10 bucks. The only thing they require is that you keep registered with them. *shrug* My mom keeps trying to get me to use it so I stop looking for her Autocad R12 disks.
Submitted by a cow-orker of Potatohead's:
.NET route, and this is sure to impact the PLM-Solutions division.
We've talked to people at "the corporation formerly known as SDRC" more than once about a Linux version. In the end, they said they could only port to so many *nix platforms, so which one did we propose they supplant? We read that to mean "not likely". After all, this was an engineering company at heart (read conservative), and they weren't about to drop a few existing customers for a potential of many more...
Now as a division of EDS, we don't hold any more hope for them than before. EDS has embraced the
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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.
That comment was a little off the hook. I need to get some prozac or something.
This is good news. The CAD choices for linux are pretty bad but getting better. However, what about a lite version for those of us that just want to design our own desk and home office space? I've tried some of the open source projects out there and they are pretty bad. The simpliest concepts like scaling your drawing to fit on a paper printout are missing. VariCad is another commercial offering but again, it's too expensive for home use. I tried their demo but it wouldn't let me save my work.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
PTC seems to be first in line to move the MCAD market to Linux. Good for them. Wonder how this will affect the other MCAD market segments. Will people switch?
Maybe just the thought of this will encourage other ports.
Their next generation of products will be built around the WildFire release of Pro/e. This is no big deal because it is in the press release. Interestingly though, they use the M$ IE components on win32 for their web enabled functionality, but use Mozilla for everything else.
Someone around here said mozilla was an important project once... (they were right!)
I think it is cool to see Mozilla being used in such a way. The fact that it was there and capable paved the way for a Linux port that will do anything the win32 one does. (Other UNIXes enjoy that now.)
Makes you wonder why we need IE doesn't it?
Blogging because I can...
Yes, you can use your super expensive video card for something productive.
That is where Will frag for bandwith starts making some sense.
All it takes is one request from someone who will purchase enough seats.
IBM's Tivoli TME10 enterprise management suite (for all I know it's called something else now, but I'm too lazy to check) is supported on OS/2 primarily because of a single customer, the UK postal system. Everyone knew it would have to happen eventually, since IBM bought Tivoli and still had a strong commitment to OS/2 back in those days -- except, of course, for making it not suck. They didn't have that strong a commitment.
Incidentally, the linux port of tivoli was originally done by a support engineer with too much time on his hands. Ah, the wonders of using CORBA and perl.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You're right on.
At Autodesk University in 1995, Autodesk, Sun, HP, SGI, & IBM were all pushing AutoCAD R13 for Unix. They had lots of demos, whitepapers, seminars, etc. Most people were still using the DOS versions of AutoCAD then (us included).
Then AutoCAD R14 came out for Windows only. Autodesk is completely in bed with Microsoft now.
This is the package as far as product design is concerned. Everything from cell phone housings to automobile engines are designed with ProE. Surely not every company uses it, but most do. Many of my friends are engineers at Fortune 50 companies. Most of them use ProE on Sparcs running Solaris. Some have converted to Windows, but the product was and is primarily designed for a Unix/X11 environment.
... horrible place to work, though. I used to contract with them, as a unix administrator. It was a fun place to learn unix, but pretty incompetent with a lot of things. No centralized password scheme, etc.
They had some really dirty tricks though. They'd hire Russian programmers for well under market, and hold their green cards over their heads. Working there as a contractor meant that you were basically mulch.
I really learned to despise Irix on that job.
Huh?!? I thought I'd heard they were planning this back in 1998 or 1999. Oh well, better late than never, I suppose.
One baby step closer to getting a 2D/3D drafting program to Linux like AutoDesk Mechanical Desktop and Inventor.
OrCAD for Linux would be great, although I've almost got SDT/PCB386 working under DOSEmu and VMWare. 800x600 with VMWare, 1024x768 for DOSEmu. :-)
Possibly the only thing holding my office at Windows is MPLAB ICE 2000. The damn thing won't install under WINE but works great under VMWare or Win4Lin. Office is licked now that StarOffice is here and Mozilla or Konq does all we need for web browsing.
The reason these engineering packages moved to Windows from Unix in the first place is that it was so much cheaper. The advantage of NT was that you could run these apps on cheap, commodity hardware, and a relatively cheap OS. The alternatives back then were commercial, proprietary Unix on expensive workstations from SGI, DEC, HP, or whoever. NT boxes cost less than half as much, and could be run by the average office's "computer whiz" (or at least that was the perception).
Since then, Linux has taken over, with the ability to run on the same cheap hardware. But now it doesn't matter as much- the savings are in the hundreds, rather than thousands, or tens of thousands per year, per seat. Compared to the cost of these apps and the salaries of the people using them, that's a drop in the bucket. Windows may not be cheap or good compared to Linux, but in the overall scheme of things it's cheap enough, and good enough.
Most of the Unix AutoCAD sales went to major accounts like government or aerospace/military. Around the time we started porting AutoCAD R13 to Unix Microsoft was making inroads selling Windows NT in those very same markets. To the pointy-haired IT managers it was a good excuse to get the engineers on the same type of systems the rest of the non-technical folks in these companies were using. And back in those days Unix workstations were priced quite high compared to WinTel hardware.
BTW, these ports were mostly paid for by the hardware manufacturers (i.e. Sun paid for the SunOS and Solaris ports, IBM for the AIX, etc.).
MS did pressure to prevent further development of a Mac port, however. One of the Mac programmers put a sign on his door: "Welcome to Autodesk--a division of Microsoft. Or it might as well be."
Nowadays the code base is so MS-centric it'd be difficult and expensive for AutoCAD to be ported to anything but Windows. And I'm sure MS would have a cow if Autodesk tried and would probably pressure to prevent, say, a Linux port. Now a Mac OS X port would be interesting. The Mac ports had a loyal following among Architects...
The threat of MS entering the CAD market was (is?) real and at one time was the biggest threat to Autodesk.
I still remember the new CEO getting rid of Ted Nelson and AMIX back in the early 90's--the thinking was that nothing would every become of this online hyperlinking stuff. Oh, well...can't win 'em all.
Well, I certainly won't be using it, then!
I can see the "Ask Slashdot" now: I manage a large aerospace machine shop and I'd like to run my shop on Linux. Is there an open-source 3D CAD/CAM program that will create NC programs that will properly control my 5-axis milling machines, lathes, and Okuma grinders? I hope to convince my managers this is a good idea!
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I believe I remember reading that Unigraphics had ported to linux (or it might have been their lower end CAD package).
But you're right on about having I-DEAS and other CAD packages on *nix. You can do an amazing amount of automation on the *unix platform that is a pain in the ass on Windows. I'm especially familiar about automating things for I-DEAS after working with for 5 years.
Don't forget IRIX.
BTW: SGI contributed their XFS filesystem bringing ACL support in the filesystem with SAMBA for Linux. (others may do this, but I am aware of XFS at the moment.)
Blogging because I can...
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.
Craig Steffen
http://www.craigsteffen.net
Not a bloody chance. They are married to the MFC and intergrated OLE application model forever. Building on this toolset (no matter how wise) is one of the keys to their business model.
Anyone running MCAD on UNIX is a ripe target for them. Less informed shops that are feeling the one box and it had better be win32 pressure is their target.
Leveraging the win32 intergrated applications is key to their gain in market share. (Which BTW is all they care about.)
They want to be the MCAD extension to Office, not the best tool.
Blogging because I can...
Heard this also. They are getting a lot of requests from Europe. (Germany actually.)
This might affect the use of Alias Studio in Pro/e shops that convert to Linux.
No remote X11 on Alias products, so either they stay with commercial UNIX, win32 or use another alternative like ICEM.
Blogging because I can...
Then the question is who?
Blogging because I can...
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.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
As for Ford switching to CATIA, possible but not likely. After the fallout, there will be pretty much only 2 products controlling high-end CAD--EDS and Dessault. Every large consumer product/automotive/aerospace company will be evaluating both products continuously, I'd imagine. Pro-E? Not bloody likely. Check their stock--Ford or any other big auto name isn't going to invest $250+ million in an MCAD package that might flounder any day now. The big 3 (really big 5) are perfectly happy dealing with EDS and IBM (dessault's reseller).
MFC... You're right, they ain't going anywhere but MS windows. They'll go down with them after all, I've NEVER seen Microsoft fight something as bad as they're fighting Linux. And it isn't because they didn't invent it, it's because they can't control it. Thanks for the heads-up on that other CAD companies tie to MFC.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Everything you described is something you can have with Windows -- well maybe not the X11 remote logins, but there is remote desktop, which is actually quite good.
I can tunnel one app from one unix box to another unix box without exporting the desktop. I can do this over the internet. I can leave a box running for 3 months and never reinstall apps. I can run the same source code on 3 different architectures with minimal changes. I can avoid giving money to a company that uses fear based tactics to make people pay for the same software 3 times.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
This is also another reason why Microsoft wants OpenGL *dead*.
All of the major MCAD packages use OpenGL for their graphics render engines. OpenGL is good at this. Today I would wager that DirectX whatever version is good as well.
Not an issue for the minor players, but the big boys are still cross platform.
MCAD and high-end analysis packages run on the UNIX platforms and OpenGL enables this.
BTW you can include on your list SolidEdge, Autodesk Inventor, IronCAD (or whatever they are calling it now), and CADKEY. Autodesk and CADKEY used to be UNIX based, but that ended in the early 90's with ACAD 12 (I think) and CADKEY 6 or 7.
Basically all the midrange stuff out there right now is built using the MFC. All of it wants to be high-end CAD. None of it is going to be.
Blogging because I can...
Too bad really. (Potatohead this time, not the cow-worker!) I-DEAS is a great modeling package. It user interface has more thought behind it than some software has for its entire development.
I hate to see it running under win32. Most of the color is gone, and all the additional customization features do little to improve the experience while producing bugs that lower the stability of the package...
Blogging because I can...
I'm aware of the "We wand OpenGL dead" line Microsoft has. OS/2 shipped with OpenGL way back in 1994 (OS/2 v3.0) and NT got it to. It was around that time that MSFT started their own 3D stuff. They only did DirectX because IBM had DIVE and showed Doom running full speed in a window on OS/2. All this was just like you said, OpenGL is not a Windows-only technology and MSFT does not own the API's. IE, they can't use them to keep the competitions applications a rev or two behind theirs.
I think it was AutoDesk bought into Microsofts "write to Win32 and have Windows AND UNIX" way back when. Bristal,Mainsoft and a couple of others were allowed to licences MSFT code to enable Win32/MFC to run compile and run on UNIX. After a few big CAD companies ported from UNIX to MFC, Microsoft pulled the rug out from under the companies providing the underlying runtimes. I think Mainsoft was the only one left standing. Their sole existance is because then needed to show in court that Bristol wasn't being targetted. Only thing was, Microsoft charged MainSoft tons for their Windows source license but turned around and paid them big bucks to port IE to Solaris and HP(?).
They are smart bastards but not technically, only business-wise. The world finally caught on that a networked computer must be peer2peer capable, secure, and robust(not crash daily). Microsoft windows is such a pig that it imploads under any reasonable load.
BTW, I think AutoDesk realized the mud they are in and started porting a bunch of stuff to JAVA. Then Microsoft pulled the JAVA rug out from under them too (requires them to install the JVM now). JAVA may not be best for all apps but it's much easier going from Java to say Qt than MFC to ANYTHING.
Looks like there's quite a self-imposed ceiling on these CAD companies and if they want to exist in 5 years, they had better get off of MFC soon. IMHO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus