Unusable, unstable menus and toolbars since V13.

Jim Canale

I occasionally take work home.  My home computer is a dual boot - Win XP and Ubuntu 12.04LTS.  Both 32 bit systems, but the Ubuntu installation is PAE, so I can access my 8GB of RAM.

A couple years ago, realizing XP would no longer be supported, I installed the linux version of V13.  Never was able to do anything with it.  The installation was unstable and it crashed repeatedly.  The toolbars wouldn't stay put, and customizations disappeared every time I re-started the program.    I never edited one single drawing with it, and the trial period expired.

When V14 came out, it was more of the same story.

Today I installed V15.  This time I had toolbars, but NO MENUS.  I finally was able to get the menus to load by re-loading the default *.CUI.  Overjoyed to see something vaguely like the desktop on my work machine, I started customizing the toolbars.  After a few changes, BricsCAD crashed.  When I re-started, all the toolbars and menus were again missing.  I was able to re-load the default *.CUI, but all my customizations were gone.

Any ideas? 

Resto Mara

CAD and many commercial  software are struggling with Linux as a stable, predictable and valuable platform for development! And I don't see this is going to change at all! The only way is to use cloud-based solution - the industry is heading there!

Tomas Polak

Hi Jim,
I found nice progress in V15 toolbars (they now stay at the seem place I put them) and interface overall. I experience no menus when I choose "Mechanical" context on one of my machines. Since I don't use that context, I didn't even report the problem - I thought it was some obscure bug.
I think you should report SR with this problem. Bricsys' staff is more active replying SR than browsing forums and I got some useeful hints or workarounds to some of my problems that way. You can point them here to see, that one more user was able to reproduce similar problem.
The interface used by BricsCAD uses WxWidgets, so I guess some of the problems we report are only reported through Bricsys staff back to WxWidgets project. It would be interesting to know if Bricsys staff is actually working on WxWidgets code.
Tom

Jim Canale

Thanks for your replies.  I've submitted an SR, although I don't expect much.   Last time I faced this problem I submitted an SR, and I recall the only suggestion was to re-install Ubuntu.    I'm not going to leap into something like that, because I had so much difficulty getting Linux to work on this machine in the first place.

I bought the hardware to build a high performance gaming machine in late 2009.   I've built machines before, and had it assembled in a day.   To make a long story short, the machine ended up a paperweight on my desk for the next two years.   I replaced every piece of hardware in it.  I re-partitioned, re-formatted, re-installed dozens of times.   I  had experts look at it.  NO ONE could figure out how to make the thing boot up.   I finally got the PC from hell working, and everything is fine EXCEPT BricsCAD.

Tomas Polak

Hi Jim,
I am sorry to hear that. I think BricsCAD on linux is very competent software plagued with UI bugs. It's unfortunate, because it drives away newcomers - it almost drew me away from BricsCAD when I did my first testing with it.
Hopefully you'll get over this bug with Bricssys staff support.