Sketchup running under Xubuntu - It's ALIVE!!!

[Eric The Viking]

This is sketchup running under Wine under Xubuntu:

I'm pleased. I've got it working nicely, I think.

If anyone's interested I'll do a write-up, but speak now, before I forget what I did!

It wasn't complicated, but it did need a few tweaks.

E.

 

[mseries]

I have it working on Linux Mint in Wine. I need to learn how to use it now !!!

 

[Eric The Viking]

Well if there's interest, I'll do Xubuntu & you do Mint!

 

[RogerP]

I've had it running for fine under Ubuntu 14.10 for some time, but I too need to learn how to use it ....

 

[terrymck]

This is sketchup running under Wine under Xubuntu:

I'm pleased. I've got it working nicely, I think.

If anyone's interested I'll do a write-up, but speak now, before I forget what I did!

It wasn't complicated, but it did need a few tweaks.

E.

What version of Sketchup is it? I got 13 32 bit working ok under Fedora but couldn't get 14 or 15 to play ball.

 

[mseries]

mine's 8.0.15. i rarely use it to be honest prefering to sketch ideas on paper. For me it's not worth my time to try to upgrade.

 

[Eric The Viking]

Sketchup 8.

I don't think I've used Fedora in over fifteen years now so can't help there. You don't need to find it: Wine has the right links as part of its installed package.

 

[xy mosian]

This is sketchup running under Wine under Xubuntu:

E.

There is a great deal of work in that Eric, the results are impressive.
Was this done with your new graphics pad? if so how did you find it in use?

xy
Edit, well that didn't work. I was hoping for a copy of the original, splendid, image.

 

[Eric The Viking]

There is a great deal of work in that Eric, the results are impressive.
Was this done with your new graphics pad? if so how did you find it in use?

[Starts, having nodded-off at his desk.]

Who, me? the drill table??

Too kind sir - it's full of horrid bodges, etc., done whilst I was first getting to grips with Sketchup.

I was hoping for a copy of the original, splendid, image.

You're welcome to it, XY, but remind me of your email address by PM. I have it somewhere, but theis Christmas has mostly been about rebuilding PCs and the home network. I don't have all of my desktop machine's disks back on line at the moment, so can't get at the email archive I need.

 

[woodfarmer]

Somehow I have never managed to install or run anything using wine. Think I may have missed something in the instructions.

 

[xy mosian]

There is a great deal of work in that Eric, the results are impressive.
Was this done with your new graphics pad? if so how did you find it in use?

[Starts, having nodded-off at his desk.]

Who, me? the drill table??

Too kind sir - it's full of horrid bodges, etc., done whilst I was first getting to grips with Sketchup.

I was hoping for a copy of the original, splendid, image.

You're welcome to it, XY, but remind me of your email address by PM. I have it somewhere, but theis Christmas has mostly been about rebuilding PCs and the home network. I don't have all of my desktop machine's disks back on line at the moment, so can't get at the email archive I need.

Thanks for the offer Eric, I did actually expect the image to appear within the quote. Hence my dismay.
I too have been mucking about with PC stuff having had a spat with my main machine. The arrival of a second, on the way to the tip, Pc has given me the opportunity to install Linux to play with, yet again.
I have leant towards Mint for a Live Cd recently so I'll probably install that.

xy

 

[Eric The Viking]

I've had fun+games with Linux's video drivers this week, and some desktop startup (post login) problems that gave me login times in excess of five minutes (with a solid-state system drive!!!).

Hair torn out, lots of soul searching about whether Ubuntu was stable enough to use for work, etc.

Googling provided fixes to the boot/login problems*. The other proved a bit more 'interesting' but with a good outcome:

Sorting out the graphics card mess:
I have a reasonably inexpensive dual DVI-ported, AMD/ATI Radeon graphics card (6570, PCI-E). It's intended for low end CAD, etc., and one reason it was relatively inexpensive was that it's not a gamers' card . Brilliant for work though.

Under Windows, there is a pretty good control panel plugin ("AMD Catalyst Control Center"), handling colour balance, scaling, desktop positioning, etc. The standard xubuntu display driver isn't very good, but it turns out there is an up-to-date, proprietary AMD/ATI driver (for Ubuntu 14.04), and the equivalent control panel. I've installed it and I'm very pleased so far...

Getting AMD/AMI graphics card drivers:
For any reasonably modern graphics card, find out exactly what you have, by opening a terminal window and typing:

lspci -vvnn | grep VGA

My card returns...

VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Turks PRO [Radeon HD 6570/7570/8550]

... as part of the returned info from these two, piped-together commands.
(note: lspci returns a lot of data; grep VGA filters it but there's still a lot of spurious stuff onscreen - don't be alarmed by this).

Anyway, you can use one of the Settings 'applets' to find the AMD proprietary driver:

Or you can go directly to the AMD web site:
http://support.amd.com/en-us/download
The above link gives you several choices for Ubuntu (read the download list carefully!), crucially whether or not you go for a basic 2D driver (normal work, including Sketchup), or 3D (games mainly). My advice is don't push it! If you don't need the 3D tweaks, the 2D driver uses fewer resources, less memory and generally should be less troublesome (hopefully not at all). Note that you can see the new AMD control panel icons in the screengrab above.

So actually I installed via the Settings applet, and it's worked very well. I also needed to re-install Wine, done from the Ubuntu Software Centre, but that was trouble-free. Sketchup runs faster, and with fewer glitches, and I think the output (rendered for the screen) is actually better.

The results
Here are a couple of "x-ray" views, which is one of the tougher rendering tasks for a graphics card +driver:

You'll immediately see I've cheated terribly with that model - no pulley cones in the gearbox, etc. In my defence, I was designing a table!

But the point is that the rendering is pretty good now, and Sketchup is nice to use, especially so with the new Wacom tablet. In particular the orbit and pan controls which are on the 2nd pen button are brilliantly quick and fluid when you're working. The 2nd and 3rd mouse button mappings (side buttons on the Wacom stylus) are swapped over from Windows, which is a pain. I'm used to the other way round, but I think I can fix that in the conf file for the Wacom driver.

More on that anon if anyone's interested.

Hope that's useful and not too boring...

E.

**Whilst it was running OK-ish using the default xubuntu drivers, there were oddities, for example my two monitors were identified the wrong way round (how can this be? Over DVI the monitor actually tells the graphics card what it's called and what capabilities it has!). Also, occasionally, the Sketchup/Wine window would 'lose it' entirely - the main, non-taskbar/menu part of the window would go totally garbled. Forcing any sort of redraw, e.g. slightly resizing it, or actually doing something to the model would fix it, but it turned out to be an early warning of "fun" to come.



*Recovery mode boot + login was nearly instant, login via my normal account was nearly eternity!

If you have similar issues - that's a very long wait on the 'running mouse' screen immediately after logging in, loss of the Panel (rough equiv. of Windows' taskbar), and/or stuff missing from menus, it's probably caused by not shutting down correctly: simply delete /home/[your account]/.cache/sessions/[everything] and shutdown/restart.
That should do it, but if menus are still missing, make sure xfwm4 is in the Application Autostart list ( a tab under System... Session and Startup in the Settings Manager). It's the 'window manager' and having it there does no harm: if absent, create a new autostart entry ("+" button at the bottom of the list) and put in "xfwm4" as the command (you need to give it a name too). It's in the default path, so no complex command is required.

 

[Eric The Viking]

Depressing update:

Something changed on the system in the last week or so to cause Sketchup effectively to stop working. I've had a few system updates, but nothing I'd thought of as significant.

Symptoms: The installed SU8 just bugsplatted, with a divide-by-zero error (why? It's only saving data!). So:
- deleted the Wine prefix,
- reinstalled SU8,
- did the necessary graphics registry hack in Wine,

Only with limited success.

SU8 now opens and apparently runs fine, until you attempt to save anything. At which point it doesn't crash, but work area video updates cease (the workarea freezes, but toolbars mouse cursors and menus all function as expected). It does seem to actually save. I've drawn objects "blind" and saved again, and they appear in the reopened file. It's not breaking the saved files (no errors on opening), but it's effectively not functional in its present state.

I've also tried Sketchup Make 2015 as an alternative, which is supposed to be rated 'gold' in terms of Wine compatibility, but the installer runs and not the SU exe, no matter how you try to invoke it. I can't get hold of any versions of SU between 8 and the current 2015 Make, so can't test them.

Switching the Windows version in Wine seems to make no difference either (tried all of them), and I don't know how to set up a 32-bit Wine prefix (as recommended by the error mesage I get from Winetricks). In fact I've no idea how to set up a Winetricks prefix anyway, which is a shame as it would probably be handy.

Very frustrated at the moment, so any suggestions will be jumped on greedily!

E.

PS: Equally frustrating: have also tried to install Corel Graphics Suite 12 into Wine (off CD), as Corel Draw from that is my favourite vector 2D program. It *nearly* works: Installs, accepts my licence key, and Draw opens a window beautifully, but then says it can't create brush default settings and crashes. PhotoPaint, which hasn't worked properly under XP for about eight years, installs and runs perfectly as far as I can tell. (but I don't actually want to use it!).

I bet it's somethign relatively trivial, but I've no idea where to start on either issue. The "WineHQ" site is about as much use as the proverbial cocoa butter teapot.

 

[Brentingby]

Why can't you get hold of SU 2013 or SU 2014? The pro versions are still available. That would at least give you the 8 hour trial period to test.

 

[Eric The Viking]

There's no point if the equivalent "Make" version isn't available, as it isn't a long term solution.

As an aside, It's even more frustrating than it was: Trimble have recently released a Sketchup viewer for both IOS and Android. So they can obviously port large chunks of their code fairly easily when they want to, and they already have a stable version for OS X. Linux ought to be relatively straightforward in that context, yet, AIUI, they are determined that they won't ever do it.

I don't need Pro, as most of the extra stuff relates to architectural practice, posh rendering and colaborative working, which aren't relevant to me. I would, however pay for a Linux version, as I like Sketchup and have invested quite a bit of time learning how to use it efficiently.

 

[Brentingby]

I understood that the pro versions after SU8 revert to Make at the end of the trial period but perhaps that functionality is disabled now.

Can you revert back to a time when SU8 did work on your machine? Since SU8 didn't change, maybe you can undo the changes that were made to your system.

 

[Eric The Viking]

Ah, OK, thanks. I'll see what can be found in that case.

Regarding the system rollback, I don't think so. I don't have easy access to a record of what's changed, and some of it was security updates anyway. It doesn't help that I can't remember the last time I used SU prior to the problems! It was fairly rcently - had just worked out an efficient way to make frame+panel construction.

 

[Brentingby]

Good luck.

I'd be interested to hear of your efficient method for making frame and panel constructions.

 

[Eric The Viking]

Well, I can't demonstrate it at the moment! :-(

It's not that efficient, just me learning how to get something that looks good enough for the job. I've got some tall doors to sort out for the fitted wardrobes I'm doing, and I'm thinking about having two rails in the middle with a small panel between (three panels altogether). There's going to have to be a separate cupboard above the main ones because of the height, so I'm trying to get a design where that doesn't look too "Ikea" (and one I can actually do!).

 

[Eric The Viking]

OK, I can't put off drawing-up the bedroom cupboards any more, as I've managed to get SU 2015 running properly under WINE under xubuntu. I've also finally discovered how to set up the buttons on my new Intuos tablet, but that'll write-up will wait for another day.

First off, Brentingby's quite right: SU 2014 and 2015 start off as the pro version and revert after 30 days to Make. Which'll do for me. The problem was that it wouldn't run at all.

The installer seems to be InstallShield, but I can't be certain. Anyway, you can download SketchUp 2015 from the Trimble Web Site, the installer runs under Wine and puts program icons on the Xubuntu desktop as you'd hope. Then nothing happens. Double-clicking an icon does nothing at all.

It turns out (at least) one DLL is missing mfc100.dll. There are no error messages - SketchUp 2015 simply doesn't run.

I found a version of the DLL in my old XP installation but it didn't help. I suspect SU 2015 is 64-bit only. Its certainly running in a 64-bit Wine prefix. My old XP was 32-bit :-(.

But there seems to be a fix: I know there are DLL-download sites out there, but the safest way to get the DLL is to download the Microsoft Visual C++ runtime library from Microsoft's web site: the 32-bit version is here and the 64-bit version, here. I needed the 64-bit one, and I'm guessing most people will.

Download the MSVC++ runtime library from one of those links and install it -- the installer works fine under Wine. It doesn't, however, seem to make the DLL available to other programmes (rather the point!). But running the installer unpacks it to give the individual files. So you can find mfc100.dll* and copy it into the Sketchup2015 directory (where Sketchup.exe is located).

So far, SU2015 is running just fine. WineHQ users rate its compatibility as Gold, meaning it's pretty rock solid. One comment suggests you need to disable the Ruby API, and I haven't tried to use any plugins yet - that may be an issue.

But it's not all sunshine... back at the wardrobes :-(

E.

*in my case it was in /home/my_root/.wine/drive_c/windows/syswow64/, but it may depend on how WINE is set up.