Protel DXP

What works

Almost everything now! Whoopee! Wine version 0.9.25 fixed almost all of the major issues I was experiencing. Bill of materials report works now, so do all of the printer dialogs and print preview. Printing to CUPS printer works too.

PCB Editor, schematic editor, SPICE simulation, library editor, autorouter, help files, and camtastic all work. It is functional enough to actually fully design a PCB now.

What does not

Camtastic does not render graphics properly, PCB does not render arcs properly e.g. start and end points for the circle are not displayed properly. Arcs do appear correctly in the gerber files and the actual endpoint data is not corrupted, it just doesn't display properly on the screen, probably a DirectX problem I'd bet.

3D OpenGL PCB rendering crashes the program and it quits. This is a kind of useless feature anyway, so I wouldn't consider it a big deal.

Text editor has a nasty scroll bug, the first 2 or three lines of text don't scroll up with the rest of the text, then when you scroll back down, the upper lines just deposit themselves (visually, not actually) where you stopped scrolling. Must be a richedit bug or something.

Nanoboard parallel port interface device driver. I don't expect that this will ever work under Wine anyway. Not a big issue unless you actually use the nanoboard for VHDL/FPGA development.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Version control, I never got it to work right in Windows either, so whatever.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

See my how-to below to install DXP on Wine

1. Create your DXP2004 installation prefix
1. WIN­EPREFIX=/home/user/DXP2004­ winecfg
2. ­Install DXP2004 from the original CD.
1. WINEPREFIX=/home/user/DXP2004 wine setup.exe
3. Install all of the available service packs:
1. WINEPREFIX=/home/user/DXP2004 wine DXP2004SP2.exe
2. WINEPREFIX=/home/user/DXP2004 wine DXP2004SP2_IntegratedLibraries.exe
3. WINEPREFIX=/home/user/DXP2004 wine AltiumDesigner2004SP3.exe
4. WINEPREFIX=/home/user/DXP2004 wine AltiumDesigner2004SP3_IntegratedLibraries.exe
5. WINEPREFIX=/home/user/DXP2004 wine AltiumDesigner2004SP4.exe
6. WINEPREFIX=/home/user/DXP2004 wine ­AltiumDesigner2004SP4_IntegratedLibraries.exe
4. Copy your .alf license file to the program directory (C:\Program Files\Altium2004)
5. Run winetricks to install MDAC 2.8, and enable font smoothing
   
6. Copy native Windows XP ole32.dll from a Windows installation, set the override with winecfg
   
7. After starting DXP, disable the "Live" parallel port driver under DXP->Preferences->FPGA->Devices View