Catia

What works

Editing assemblies, solids, sketches, even FEA calculations, ... after doing a day's worth of work with it, I've yet to find a serious issue.

What does not

Installer throws an error and reports unsuccessful installation - click the error away and ignore that, it'll work regardless. The failure log talks something about an Orbix Daemon - whatever that is.

Toolbar icons with sub-toolbars are initially drawn in the wrong order and look messy. They work fine regardless and appear fine, once used.

Still no perfect compatibility with Mesa/DRI's OpenGL implementation for Intel graphics (G33 here). The application dies and Wine throws an excuse in some cases of graphics handling. One example is to view Von-Mises stresses, where numbers (should) pop up as you move the mouse over the part. This is likely an issue not with Wine, but with the OpenGL driver and can be worked around by setting the INTEL_NO_BLIT environment variable:

env INTEL_NO_BLIT=1 wine .../catstart.exe ...

Workarounds

What was not tested

Catia's 64-bit version.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Apparently, winetricks is no longer needed for installing vcrun2005 and vcrun2008. However, you still have to raise the number of open files allowed. Also not a Wine issue and can be solved by adding this line into /etc/security/limits.conf: [your username] - nofile 4096 Then log out and log back in to get this setting into effect - or reboot the machine. Last not least, the main menu flickers a lot on many operations - obviously the real Windows is a lot faster here, so you don't notice that.

How to get best results:

$ wget http://kegel.com/wine/winetricks
$ sh winetricks vcrun2005

(2) Run the Installer. Do a custom install of the MD2 or ME2 package, only. Avoid the "Orbix daemon", extra language packages and Enovia. This will even get you a nice and working icon on the desktop.

(3) Compile Mesa from scratch to get a debuggable, unoptimised software renderer:

$ sudo apt-get build-dep libgl1-mesa-swx11

$ tar -xvjf MesaLib-7.0.3.tar.bz2

$ cd MesaLib*

$ make CFLAGS="-Wall -Wmissing-prototypes -g -fPIC -m32 -DDEBUG -D_POSIX_SOURCE -D_POSIX_C_SOURCE=199309L -D_SVID_SOURCE -D_BSD_SOURCE -D_GNU_SOURCE -DPTHREADS -DUSE_XSHM -DHAVE_POSIX_MEMALIGN -DUSE_X86_ASM -I/usr/X11R6/include -std=c99 -ffast-math -fno-strict-aliasing" LDFLAGS="-L/lib32 -L/usr/lib32" linux-x86-32

$ sudo make INSTALL_DIR=/opt/mesa install

(4) Open (another) terminal.

(5) Set the new Mesa lib to be used:

$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/mesa/lib

(6) Show the properties of Catia's desktop icon.

(7) Copy the command in the "starter" tab.

(8) Paste this command to the terminal shell and - whoops - Catia should launch and show you an empty Project. Watch the compass while you use the mouse to verify the 3D view is working properly.

(9) Have fun, but remember you have to switch back to Windows to open a saved file ;-)