Altium Designer

What works

Even though 6.8 is an older release, it is still very strong and is running well on Mint 17 (32-bit) with the latest Wine 1.7.33.  Everything works (except CAMtastic and 3D board rendering).  From design import or project creation to schematic creation, PCB design & layout and gerber file generation, it doesn't seem to fail (it does not even exhibit random DLL failures and the library management is stable and doesn't crash when changed -- unlike glitches known to rear their ugly heads in some even recent releases ).

What does not

CAMtastic and 3D board rendering (but those are known issues with no workaround that I know of).  Just don't use them (3D viewing is only marginally useful, anyway).  Instead, use Linux "gerbv" as an excellent gerber viewer.

Workarounds

What was not tested

I did a complete flow front start to finish, so I think I covered pretty much all of it.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

After installation, make sure to: 1) Run: sudo apt-get install winetricks winetricks ie6 mdac28 corefonts tahoma (ie6 is needed for html reports, and mdac28 is needed or else it will not boot) 2) Navigate to: Program Files/Altium Designer 6/System Then rename CAMTASTIC.dll --> CAMTASTICxdll (or some other name) (This is needed to prevent CAMtastic from running).