coco

With the some help by Codeweavers it should not be too hard to make WV work on all Linux distros around. See www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/certify/. All windows API?s that the Windows version of VW uses has to be taken care of by codeweavers crossover/wine. I hope Nemetschek at least could take contact with the Codeweavers team to find out how hard it would be. A lot of popular comercial Windows programs already work this way under Linux (and also Mac today).

Well you are right about it?s hard to find a successful commercial software for Linux, simply because there are so many good free alterantives like OpenOffice, The Gimp, Firefox and so on. However there is still no good cadprogram and that is also the only reason for me and some of my architect frinds to be held back to Windows. I cannot belive that we are the only one intrested in getting a good cadtool on Linux. A switch to Mac is not intresting me, what has changed if one do that? The OS, but not the freedom how to use that OS. On the architectfirm with around 60 persons where I work, we consider the software beeing a costly part in our budget. Linux is a very intresting alterantive, it has all programs needed for our work except a good cadprogram.

Well the figure is a snapshot of workstations (not servers), go to http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp and you can se the trend is that Linux is growing. I do agree that the Mac share of the designers is greater. We are not talking about making a new Cadprogram, only about porting an existing one that has already been shown to be portable. There are two dominating systems among all distros in the Linux world, debian and RPM. Making VW work on one would make the packaging for the other easy, or why not just use the new www.autopackage.org that works for all systems. I do think a VW port for Linux would payoff itself. An easy way to start with would be to use wine to make the windows version of VW work on Linux (http://www.winehq.org). In that way a native port could be considered later.

I forgot to add that the OS statistics where found at http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Well I like that VW is already on two platforms. That means it should not be impossible to make that trick again. Below is some market statistics: September 2006 WinXP 75.6%, W2000 9.2%, Win98 1.4%, WinNT0.3%, W2003 2.0%, Linux 3.5%, Mac 3.8% As you can see Mac is not that big either. I know a lot of desginers uses it, but why not when the alternative is Windows...However Linux is growing and a good alround cadprogram is missing. I think the one that gets there first will take market shares. So what's the bloody point? It?s to make money!

Nice that to see I?m not the only one intrested in this subject . I also tried Ubuntu, it is actually the underlaying OS for SimplyMepis now. Mepis has just added some free comercial stuff like Skype and multimedia support for DVD, mp3 etc and made some tweaks in their package. I found the Mepis distro better for my taste right now... I have tried to run VW in a virtual VMWare machine (www.vmware.com) running WinXP this weekend. It works, but the graphic is slooow, even with VMtools installed. So now I?m trying to find out if there is some other way to speed up the virtual machines graphic. If it?s possible it could be a temporary solution to run VW with a Linux host OS. I do agree with you that porting VW to GNU/Linux now would immediatly corner the market. Let?s hope Nemetschek is also aware of this...

Hello! I?m new to VW, but find it to be a very nice cadplatform. However I?m surprised that there are no diskussion about porting VW to Linux. I think it should not be so hard to make a Linux version from the Mac version that is also Unix based today. I know there is a lot of Linux users outside this forum searching for a good CAD alternative on Linux. A lot of users also would like to move to Linux but are stoppet beacuse of there is no good cad-/BIM alterantive for Linux today. The best I Linux CAD I found so far is IntelliCAD from www.bricscad.com, which I today use on Windows because of there application Architecturals is not yet ported... I hope VW could be ported very soon to both deb and rpm packages so it could be run on almost every common Linux distro out there! The Linux market is growing very fast - so I think nemetscheck should make their Linuxport now!! Check out for example the following distros if have not tried Linux yet: www.simplymepis.org (nice deb disto with some commercial apps, live cd) www.ubuntu.org or www.kubunru.org (totaly opensource, deb, live cd) www.suse.com (commercial disto rpm based) live cd means you can try the full distro from a cd without installing it to the harddisk.