Using Google SketchUp version 8 (sketchup8) under Wine

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TimSmall
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Using Google SketchUp version 8 (sketchup8) under Wine

Post by TimSmall »

Hello,

SketchUp is a CAD program, which runs well under Wine, and has an entry in the Wine AppDB (and also in winetricks).

SketchUp was bought by Google, and later sold by them to Trimble.

Version 8 of SketchUp was the last one to be released by Google prior to the sale.

Following acquisition by Google, SketchUp was released with versions which are free to use, and also paid "pro" versions.

For version 9 and later, Trimble removed important (for me) features from the free version, and also changed the licensing terms (v9 and all later versions disallow any commercial use of the free version - which I occasionally need).

For this reason, I (and quite a few others) continue to use version 8 of SketchUp.

Info on SketchUp 8 has been removed from the AppDB by the maintainers, and I think it might be useful to have a separate AppDB entry for SketchUp 8 for the reasons I give above.

Here are some notes for effectively installing and using SketchUp 8 (Debian 11, Wine 5.0.3):

The last version of SketchUp 8 released was "Google SketchUp 8.0.16846" - this was available to download from Trimble until early 2020, and can be found via The Way Back Machine at

Code: Select all

https://web.archive.org/web/20140311024326/http://dl.trimble.com/sketchup/gsu8/FW-3-0-16846-EN.exe
. Although it was a bugfix maintenance release by Trimble, it seems to carry the same license terms as the original version 8 release by Google.

To successfully run SketchUp 8, you must:

Install the Visual C++ runtime version 2005 (e.g. winetricks "vcrun2005").
Install SketchUp 8 using the FW-3-0-16846-EN.exe installer at the above URL.
Set this registry key:

Code: Select all

HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Google/SketchUp8/GLConfig/Display/HW_OK = 1
Having done this, SketchUp 8 will run but it attempts to contact Google at runtime (presumably to send back telemetry). The backend API on Google's servers is no longer present, and unfortunately this results in very lengthy network timeouts, which in-turn result in very long pauses (10s of seconds) during file I/O as well as startup and shutdown of the application. For this reason, I recommend taking steps to make these calls fail quickly. I do this by running Sketchup inside an isolated Linux network namespace, like this:

unshare -r -n wine "c:\Program Files\Google\Google SketchUp 8\SketchUp.exe"

I'd be happy to maintain a separate AppDB entry for SketchUp 8.

Thanks to all current and past maintainers of Wine for making such a useful piece of software!

Tim.
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Re: Using Google SketchUp version 8 (sketchup8) under Wine

Post by Bamm »

Maybe if you put the server's IP addresses in your hosts file the lengthy timeouts will disappear?
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