Linux is a great OS for engineering tools, as well as many other reasons.
I have been using it since RedHat 5, and have helped motivate several
of the EE tool vendors to migrate from HP, Solaris, etc. to
Linux. I worked for company X that had huge clusters of
processors that replaced several older Unix net batch
configurations. There was one cluster of around 3,000 cpus, and
that was just the primary compute server for our division of 300+
engineers. Many of these clusters served engineering groups all
over the company, and we were less than ten percent of the engineering
force there. You could submit a job that would take hours on the
Solaris or other net batches which now takes a millisecond or so.
Of cource there were more cpus in the cluster as well, but they were
inexpensive sine we made those too. I did not work for AMD!
Anyway, I now use Fedora Core 3 with SELinux set for enforcing targeted
mode. I don't know how much faster/slower proe runs on Linux as
opposed to windos, but there are several options you have to set the
allocated memory and kernel process priority which dramatically changes
the speed a program runs.
FlexLm is not difficult to set either. You can set it up to serve
from your local machine or from another machine on the network.
You have to setup your network controller to take the name
"eth0". It seem that Flexlm only looks for the NIC named "eth0",
and reads the hardware address from it to serve licenses. You do
need to have a route to this card in route table, and if you can ping
the NIC, Flexlm should work. Also, Flexlm needs to talk to proe
or other programs it is licensing via a socket on one of the IP
addresses you have setup in your machine.
In other words, if you have 123.123.123.3 configured to your nic, then
your license file should have either the host name you gave your
machine or the IP, the hardware address (MAC address), and the port
(socket) number you want to connect on:
1. Make sure your NIC is plugged in, mine is PCMCIA.
2. Load the module driver for the NIC, mine is 8139too (# modprobe 8139too)
3. Run # ifconfig -a to see if the card is there
4. Run # ifup eth0 to bring up the network interface
5. ping 123.123.123.3 to see if the card is responding
6. Make your license.dat file match the IP and give it a port
7. Run # ptcstartserver to start flexlm and have it start serving licenses
8. Run # lmutil lmdiag to test the license
9. Run $ proe, or whatever the name of you startup script is
10. ProE should come up, note that the start script has to be created
to start any extra or extension modules in proe with the install setup
program.
Overall, I would suggest Linux to everyone. It has come a long
way since the early 1990s, and most all of Mentor's, Avant!, Altera,
Cadence, and all IC/RF engineering tools are supported as well as many
windows programs run with the CrossOver office libraries
installed. Pretty much I have found, Word, Excel, Power Point,
Quicken, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. all work fine. IE doesn't
work for some reason, but it seems to be a minority. Multi-media
works well, including watching DVDs, mp3s, etc.
I am running KDE as the desktop with Proe WF2, Avant! HSPICE, DDE
(Mentor) SMECAD (PCB layout), Altera Quartus, Verilog, Aplac RF design,
Undertow waveform viewer, Matlab, Labview, etc. Basically,
I can design just about any type of electromechanical product I can
think of.
The mechanical engineering tool market is coming along slowly, but
things are moving forward. NASTRAN products are available for
instance to work along with ProE, and I use Illustrator or SMECAD to
design the lexan overlays for test equipment and the like.
If you have any questions let me know, and I will try and help.
-cm
