Vectorworks 2010 almost working

consta · Post by **consta** » Wed May 26, 2010 5:07 am

Hi all!

I'm trying to get the cadprogram Vectorworks 2010 (VW) run with Wine. So far I have succeed in getting the program installed and to start up with a plain Wine installation in PClinuxOS 2010. To get the toolboxes and everything look normal I had to install GDI+ (gdiplus) via Winetricks.

However the drawing area is still messed up after this even if the toolboxes look fine. On one computer with an ATI Radeon HD 4550 graphic card the drawing area is showing a colorful noisy pixel view (hard to explain), and on my Laptop with an ATI X1200 graphic card the drawing area is black. Even if I can't see what I´m drawing it´s possible to draw lines etc and save the file, the object are there when I open the file with VW in Windows.

I have seen that VW 2008 got gold status after installing GDI+. After that the 3D modeling engine has changed in VW2009 to Parasolid 3D modeling kernel built by Siemens PLM. I don't know if this can have something to do with the problem....

So as far as I can see VW should work if I only got the drawing area fixed. So has anyone suggestions on how to fix this?

L. Rahyen · Post by **L. Rahyen** » Wed May 26, 2010 10:44 pm

On 2010-05-26 (May, Wednesday) 10:07:02 consta wrote:

Hi all!

I'm trying to get the cadprogram Vectorworks 2010 (VW) run with Wine.
...
However the drawing area is still messed up after this even if the
toolboxes look fine. On one computer with an ATI Radeon HD 4550 graphic
...
and on my Laptop with an ATI X1200 graphic card the drawing area
is black.
...
So as far as I can see VW should work if I only got the drawing area fixed.
So has anyone suggestions on how to fix this? [Rolling Eyes]

Are you really sure that this is Wine bug? If you didn't try the program with
NVidia card (ideally with latest NVidia driver) it is very likely to be the
cause. I have seen some applications and games working perfectly with NVidia
card and working badly or even not working at all with ATI. So, first step is to
try it with NVidia card. If this doesn't help - report a bug to Wine bugzilla.
If it does help you can report a bug to ATI about yet another bug in their
Linux driver.

consta · Post by **consta** » Thu May 27, 2010 7:09 am

No, I´m not sure if it´s a Wine bug, I only know there is a problem. As you say the ATI card/driver can be casuing this behaviour. At the moment I´m only having ATI cards here, so I can't test it with Nvidia unless I get an new Nvidia card, I will think about it. Thanks for your tips so far!

L. Rahyen · Post by **L. Rahyen** » Thu May 27, 2010 8:45 am

On 2010-05-27 (May, Thursday) 12:09:21 consta wrote:

No, Iï¿½m not sure if itï¿½s a Wine bug, I only know there is a problem.

Since you have different behavior with different ATI cards on two different
computers this alone *suggests* driver problem. It is unlikely (but
theoretically possible) that bug in Wine can do this - therefore buggy ATI
driver is a more likely cause. To be honest, when you are on Linux with ATI
card - it almost always gives some problems (but as I said before even on
Windows it can give problems in some professional CAD applications).

If you want to use Linux with 3D (or advanced 2D) applications you really
should have NVidia card. Some people think that ATI will make its driver as
good as NVidia' one someday but unfortunately I really don't see it happening
any time soon: currently it have much more bugs than NVidia driver.

consta · Post by **consta** » Sat May 29, 2010 10:37 am

L. Rahyen, thanks for your tips. I have now made some more testings based on them.

First I noticed the motherboard an Intel® Desktop Board DG35EC is equipped with an Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator X3500 on board graphics subsystem. So I took out the ATI 4550HD card and started up PCLOS with the Intel on board card. Now VW starts up and looks ok and the drawing area is white as it should be (mot noisy or black), but when drawing something like a line it only shows while being drawn and then when finishing it disappears. I can mark it, but I can't see the line only the handles for resizing etc. I also tried to change colors but nothing helps. I also opened a saved drawingfile which opens fine but the drawing area shows nothing unless I hower over objects with the mouse and mark them. I can use all kind of tools and rendering settings, the program will not crash but I can't see anything.

The second test is with a NVidia 7900GS card I found in another computer. I strated up with it and I've got the same result as described above.

So yes there are problems with the ATI cards, both were not working good at all. The NVidia card seems to work, but there is something not working properly with the drawing area.

perryh · Post by **perryh** » Sun May 30, 2010 1:01 am

"consta" <[email protected]> wrote:

... when drawing something like a line it only shows while being
drawn and then when finishing it disappears. I can mark it, but
I can't see the line only the handles for resizing etc. I also
tried to change colors but nothing helps. I also opened a saved
drawingfile which opens fine but the drawing area shows nothing
unless I hower over objects with the mouse and mark them. I can
use all kind of tools and rendering settings, the program will
not crash but I can't see anything.

This sounds as if the lines are being drawn at "0" width, which at
least in some rendering systems conventionally means "the narrowest
possible on the device being used".

It might help to set the line properties to something wider than
the thinnest available.

consta · Post by **consta** » Sun May 30, 2010 7:26 am

Perryh, the lines width is around 0,25 mm, not 0. I also tried with fills but nothing is seen, not even the opengl mode where everything should be rendered. Also I can see the line while drawing it, but when ending the command the line disappears.

L. Rahyen · Post by **L. Rahyen** » Sun May 30, 2010 9:57 am

On 2010-05-29 (May, Saturday) 15:37:38 consta wrote:

So yes there are problems with the ATI cards, both were not working good at
all. The NVidia card seems to work, but there is something not working
properly with the drawing area.

Please report a bug to Wine bugzilla: http://bugs.winehq.org . Currently there
is no bug report about the problem with drawing area in Vectorworks so your bug
report would be valuable. However please note that currently Wine is in a
code freeze, so non-regression bugs are likely to be fixed after release of Wine
1.2.

consta · Post by **consta** » Mon May 31, 2010 5:33 pm

Reported as Bug 22988.

Troglodyte · Post by **Troglodyte** » Wed Aug 18, 2010 5:34 am

Just installed VectorWorks 2010 with wine 1.3 and works brilliantly so far. I get a little artifacting (if that's a real word) when i open vectorworks initially op open a drawing but running the mouse cursor over the drawing area cleans that up. In fact the graphics seems a little slow to update at times like if i give coordinates to a symbol it seems to be one step behind until i cheat the display refresh by clicking a drop down menu. Still this means i have no need for any other operating system besides linux.

Troglodyte · Post by **Troglodyte** » Wed Aug 25, 2010 2:09 am

After a bit more time plan drawing i've found unsurprisingly my Desktop runs Vectorworks much more nicely than my laptop. The only problems i have now is copy and paste...... kinda works. Once it starts playing up though i can only paste the last thing i copied from a native app. On the up side though copying from a native app INTO vectorworks is a breeze.
The other problem is it often crashes when i'm creating or editing text in the drawing space. The work around i've been using is to copy and paste new text in from Open Office each time. Both problems have been submitted as bugs
Copy and paste - Bug 24133
Crash while creating or editing text - Bug 24132

Neither of those problems have made drawing full new plans or making touring plans a problem though.