CAD problems with Vista?

[waterworld]

Has anyone encontered problems with running or even being able to run CAD programs on Vista? I am in the market for a new computer but have been hearing reports that various software either runs slower or is incompatible. Any ideas what programs are working OK? Would it be better to buy a machine still running XP or just wait until the bugs are fixed?
Thanks

[terhohalme]

We had some problems in our college with MSOffice 2007 in Vista! If you work with CAD for living, use XP. Vista looks good and has nice multimedia, but... I 'll wait some sort of service pack until I use Vista.

Terho

[Steve Baer]

I would have to agree with Terho. I've been running Vista in order to get Rhino running smoothly on it and the operating system has some pretty serious graphics performance issues right now that don't exist in XP. This will probably all go away over time as the graphics card vendors get their drivers updated, Microsoft gets more updates out, and CAD software companies make little tweaks to get everything working just right.

http://en.wiki.mcneel.com/default.as...noOnVista.html

Rhino V4 should run smoothly on Vista after we put out our first service release. In the meantime I would recommend sticking with XP.

Thanks,
-Steve

[Martijn_vE]

Steve,

I had a lot of problems running Vista too. The Delphi version I use officially is not compatible with Vista. In a remote corner of the web I found the suggestion to use the option to run the software as administrator. This solved my problems, and it appears that Rhino 3 runs normally that way too. No complaining about the registry. Maybe that's helpful to you guys.

Vista indeed looks cool, but it pretty much treats you like a 4 year old. I was trying to get rid of some files but was being told by the software that I had no right to do so since I was not the owner of those files! (just bought the laptop a week ago so in my opinion that makes me the owner) Also you have no rights to put any files in the root of your hard disc and for every action you want to take you have to confirm 3 or 4 times that you're really sure you want to do that.

Another `surprise` is the huge amount of memory consumed by Vista. 750 to 800 Mb just to get the bare OS up and running. Hardly worth the nicer graphics.

So I´m going to hit the format option, wipe the entire disc and reinstall XP.

[Tim B]

I did post a reply somewhere to this effect when I beta tested Vista. As far as I'm concerned, that sort of performance drop (which is nothing to do with Rhino) is utterly unacceptable, and is indicative of Microsoft's attitude towards the market.

The problem with all (recent) OSes from MS is that they assume that all thier customers are "users" and not "sysadmins". Consequently there is a lot of bloat to make everything "easy" to set up, which actually just makes everything a lot harder to set up as you want it. Vista has attempted to implement a file ownership system like Linux/Unix has. Unfortunately, even though you can login as an administrator, you can't correct another administrator's mistakes. Essentially they've taken a good idea and nearly made it work.

I presonally think that Vista is woefully incomplete relative to most Linux Distros.

On a similar topic, has there been any movement on a Linux version of Rhino? I'm having a look around at a few distros at the moment, but the Mandriva/SUSE/Fedora/Ubuntu quartet are probably good ones to go on.

Cheers,

Tim B.

[Steve Baer]

Vista seems to have two problem areas as far as I can tell.
1. The User Access Control stuff is so annoying that everyone will probably turn it off as soon as possible making the OS no more secure than it was. When Rhino starts up it shell executes a small application that checks for updates on the web. For some reason, this application is marked as requiring administrator priviledges for no reason that we have been able to determine yet. Rhino, which calls pretty much every API under the sun does not get marked as requiring administrator privelidges. ???

2. The other problem area is the accelerated graphics support. I know that NVidia and ATI are putting out drivers as fast as they can, but right now most low to mid range graphics cards have little or no OpenGL support. The other graphics problem area is with drawing GDI on top of any accelerated graphics window. This just doesn't work anymore in Vista and Microsoft states that it won't in the future. Right now, I'm adding a DirectX display option for Rhino and getting rid of and GDI drawing on top of an accelerated windows (dragging splitter bars while resizing viewports uses GDI XOR drawing.) If you have Vista and want to see what I'm talking about, make your Rhino viewport shaded and start resizing viewports.

About once a month, I try the latest Wine distros on our Suze box (OK I really haven't tried for the last two months with all the Vista bugs I've been trying to fix.) I build a basic "hello world" dialog application that uses MFC and is built with VC 2005. This application does not load with WINE. They appear to not have a lot of support for VC 2005 and MFC yet. There is some manifest/theme type item that they recommend I comment out of the WINE source and recompile WINE, yuck. An MFC application built with VC6 does work on WINE, but that really doesn't for getting Rhino 4 up and running on Linux (it just proves that WINE is operating correctly on the computer).

Thanks,
-Steve

[Tim B]

How about the older versions of Rhino? ok, V4 might not be as Linux-compatible as we'd like, but versions 1 and 2 definitely are. Version 3 has funny licence problems, but I'm sure that could be alleviated by (in the first instance) assuming that the licence is always ok.

Good to know you're trying it though.

Tim B.

[Steve Baer]

Hi Tim,
The code for V3 is complete. We are now working on service release fixes for V4 and new features in V5. If anything is going to get changed to help Rhino run on WINE, it would be in the V4/V5 code streams.

Thanks,
-Steve

[nico]

Hi Steve,
I'd like to see Rhino under linux, not under wine. Is it something that has been considered at McNeel?
I am sure it will come in the future, linux (I have tried opensuse and kubuntu, both great) is definitely a great OS. But how long will I have to wait for Rhino?

[Steve Baer]

Hi Nico,
This is similar to our story for developing on MAC.
http://en.wiki.mcneel.com/default.as...eel/NoMac.html

We will always try to do what we reasonably can to get Rhino to run on other platforms in the future. There is no way I can look into a crystal ball and tell you how long you would have to wait for Rhino on Linux.

Thanks,
-Steve

[yipster]

came across this article about the vista / cad upgrade advisor