I spent some time today looking for CAD packages that work well on Linux.
I’ve used autocad before and it worked O.K. but took some getting used to. I was hoping for something that was similar but not necessarily as powerful – autocad-lite or similar.
After some searching and tossing out many would-be contenders I found that qcad was moderately well regarded – as opposed to almost every other free CAD package which were ‘in development’ or simply abysmal.
Determined to install it on Centos 5 I downloaded the community edition source codes (qcad-2.0.5.0-1-community.src) . The instructions that came with it were non-existent so I chose a basic approach.
Copy the downloaded file qcad-2.0.5.0-1-community.src.tar.gz to /usr/local/src
then
cd /usr/local/src
tar -xzf qcad-2.0.5.0-1-community.src.tar.gz
rm -f qcad-2.0.5.0-1-community.src.tar.gz
cd qcad-2.0.5.0-1-community.src
after a bit of poking around I found the scripts directory
cd scripts
./build_qcad.sh
This didn’t work due to an error
error: ISO C++ does not support ‘long long’
A bit of searching and I discovered a simple fix
cd /usr/local/src/qcad-2.0.5.0-1-community.src/mkspecs
nano defs.pro
then comment out lines 2 and 3 thus
#QMAKE_CXXFLAGS_DEBUG += -pedantic
#QMAKE_CXXFLAGS += -pedantic
It seems that the -pedantic causes problems handling long long.
Re-running the build script
./build_qcad.sh
I get an error
sh: ./release_translations.sh: No such file or directory
Building qcad binary failed
More searching and another easy fix
./build_qcad.sh notrans
Finally it all built. But it wasn’t integrated with gnome or kde. How to make this happen will be another journal entry. For now start a terminal session
cd /usr/local/src/qcad-2.0.5.0-1-community.src/qcad
./qcad&
And then the qcad program starts up. On initial inspection it seems to be O.K. with no malformed windows/text or obscure start messages. The real problem is how to use it. I am sure there are tutorials, but there is nothing intuitive in the program – unlike other graphics packages I have used.
More information later when I figure this guy out.
2008 f 15 at 12:49 am |
For the long long issue you can alternatively add -Wno-long-long to lines 2 and 3. They will look something like:
QMAKE_CXXFLAGS_DEBUG += -pedantic -Wno-long-long
QMAKE_CXXFLAGS += -pedantic -Wno-long-long
2009 f 10 at 2:41 am |
Your explanation helped me tremendously. Thanks.
I had to make one minor change to your procedure as follows.
Instead of using “./build_qcad.sh -notrans”
I had to use “./build_qcad.sh notrans” (no minus)
Some other steps in the qcad README file were required.Specifically a couple of environment variables had to be set. These were noted in the README file.
I installed on CentOS 5.
I had to install “qt-devel-…” to get qmake and uic. See the README file.
2009 f 22 at 9:04 pm |
Thanks for this works fine on Slackware 12.2 but I also needed to use “./build_qcad.sh notrans” not “./build_qcad.sh -notrans”