Big news from Bricsys today: Bricscad for Linux just went from Alpha to Beta status. The 10.4.4 release is available for testing here. A banner with download link is now on Bricsys' English homepage (the other languages pages have not been updated yet). The move to beta means it is possible to file support requests to report bugs.

Some things to note with this release:

• Printing is now available
• Improved Debian/Ubuntu install package: it now support 64-bit architecture
• The .tgz archive was corrected as well
• The 'Help' command now opens the online help in an external browser
• Some issues still remain; Bricsys recommends that beta-testers should regularly check the Release Notes page for an updated list of known issues.

It's been clear for some time that the "early Q2 final release" announced back in February wouldn't be met. With this move to beta, I think we may be looking at a final release by end of summer (which is what was told an eager customer by a French vendor, a short while ago).

Update: according to Bricsys' press release, the first commercial version is to be released at the end of June 2010. Thanks to "Visitor" (who left a comment) for pointing that out.

This is my tenth post, and my first reviewing a free and open source CAD package. Considering that the About page says I'm a "staunch supporter of FOSS", well it was about time! Since writing about the installation process took longer than anticipated, I decided to do a two-parter: next part will be about running and using the software.

PythonCAD is a simple - I'd even say rudimentary - 2D CAD app which is programmed, as one might guess, in Python. It's a free project licenced under the GPL. One of its goals is to provide a scriptable application.

The project was initially developed continuously from 2002 to 2007, with no less than 36 releases in that span, then it was abandoned. In May 2009, the project was picked up by a new maintainer, how a few months after published a new release, in Dec. 2009.

This 37th and latest version is still a development release. It can be downloaded from SourceForge here as a .tar.gz archive.

(Please note: there is also a pythoncad package available in the Debian and Ubuntu repositories, which would be a lot more easier, and really quick to install through the Synaptic package manager or the Ubuntu Software Centre. But since this package is built from the DS1-R35 release from way back in 2006, I chose to install the latest R37 from the project's website; it supposedly eliminates bugs and adds a few more features.)

I found this bit of news on BlenderNation. It piqued my interest for two reasons: first because the documentary, which was broadcast March 16th, is about the 1759 Battle for Québec, an event that shaped my country's and my province's history. Some scenes were filmed not very far from where I live! Second, because a free open source software, Blender, was used to produce all the graphics shown in the documentary.

Producer and director Nathan Williams writes to BlenderNation:

I was reading the Bricsys for Linux forum today and came upon this thread. A user is looking for a DWF viewer running on Linux. Right now, he uses a free DWG viewer from Brava! (a Windows app which opens DXF and DWF as well) installed with Wine (the software layer which allows some Windows apps to work on Linux). Unfortunately, viewing performance is poor.

DWF (Design Web Format) was created by Autodesk in 1995 as a means to distribute and communicate design data for users to view, review and print without the need of having AutoCAD (or other CAD software) installed. Since the data is compressed, the files are smaller and faster to transmit. DWF competes against the ubiquitous PDF. From limited personal experience with the former, DWF files can be smaller than PDF ones.

First, some clarification: although this is my third post about Bricscad already, I do intend to talk about other software on this blog, and obviously free and open source software!

In my two previous posts I talked about Bricscad, an AutoCAD clone which shares with its counterpart a similar UI (in classic mode if compared to AutoCAD 2009 & 2010), its command line, and uses the DWG format natively. Bricscad has the advantage of price over AutoCAD, selling for a fraction of an AutoCAD licence. Bricscad V10 Pro, which supports 3D ACIS solids, is even cheaper than the 2D-only AutoCAD LT. This comes at a price though, as it lags AutoCAD in performance and features.

These are my thoughts after reviewing Alpha releases 10.3.4 and 10.3.6. As I had already created numerous screenshots of the 10.3.4 release, I chose to use them unchanged in this post since the 10.3.6 release does not show any major cosmetic change. Only five of these screenshots are shown here, but you can find a link to an image gallery at the end of the post, where the whole set of eighteen is available.