Pro-Engineer on a Mac

Does anyone have direct experience using Pro-Engineer on a Mac. I am at a new company where they are trying to use Mac only. I would be interested in any engineering CAD software for the Mac also.

Reply to
George Hobart
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PTC has never had a MAC version of Pro/E. Nor do they have any plans for such. There just isn't enough demand. In fact, you probably will not find any solid modeling CAD software for the MAC.

Reply to
Gerry

: : PTC has never had a MAC version of Pro/E. : Nor do they have any plans for such. : There just isn't enough demand. : In fact, you probably will not find any solid modeling CAD software for the : MAC.

The Mac, in spite of its excellent graphics, has been generally ignored by the mech eng people. PTC does, however, have a conceptual design program called, not surprisingly, Pro/CONCEPT, for the Mac. More along the lines of product design than mechanical engineering, it is available in a free version for tryout called Pro/CONCEPT Express. For more information, check out the following link:

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David Janes

Reply to
David Janes

I've run XP on a G3 in pc emulation mode, and I expect it would run Pro like that, but don't expect any support if it wasn't perfect.

Performance was acceptable, although bang for buck was poor.

Reply to
John Wade

We are planing on doing it on a G-4 with dual processors and 2 gig of RAM. We decided on the G-4 and not the G-5 because there are numerous reports that the G-5 does not emulate well. As far as support, does PTC ever give any real support anyway? I may have an occassional command question for them, but it seems that once the software is sold all they do is try to sell you upgrades. It would be nice if there was a Unix software that would run on the Unix of the MAC. Thanks for your help.

Reply to
George Hobart

It might be interesting to see if there is a falvor of unix Pro/E that would run under X-Windows within OSX. Or at least try to see if there is a performance gain by remote displaying in OSX using the X-Windows interface that is available for OSX. If it worked, and you were lucky, the graphics would work fine, and you would likely be faster than an emulated Windows XP - which I have tested and basically sucks.

In the "old days", we used to remote shell into a more powerful unix box - that was typically sitting on a design manager's desk - and then port the display back to our terminals to steal the extra horse power that was only being used for admin/review functions and sending e-mail. Back then, new unix machines where the "small cell phone" and "small portable notebook" within a company - desirable as a status symbol first and used for work second...

I would be on OSX in a second if my customers where there. Windows in general is still a work in progress, and is still a fraction of the capabilities that have existed on Unix for the past 10 years.

Dave

Reply to
Dave Bigelow

I've been reading this thread with curiosity. Mac OS X is certainly a fantastic platform.

Unfortunately my opinion is Pro/E is not. When it's working without bugs, it's a great product. The problem is crashing - I would be very surprised if it were stable and of good performance using any sort of emulator or shell. My suggestion to the original poster is to test the h**l out of the Mac box with Pro/E, and keep in mind that any new release or build code brings the possibility of compatibility problems.

Dave

Reply to
David Geesaman

We've run tons of apps via X-Ware for years here. We are doing remote displays of Solaris apps to Windows boxes (NT, 2000, XP). All the Sun boxes are rack-mounted up in the switching room, and we generally have one user per Unix station. We've never tried to run ProE that way, though we have run legacy CAD/CAM (Anvil-5000 in particular) extensively. There are performance hits due to the bandwidth problem

- all your graphics have to flow down that 100Mbps pipe - but they are not crippling.

Our software is PC-Xware from NCD Corp. Hummingbird and WRQ also make similar programs.

You don't really need any kind of compatibility between the X-ware app and ProE; Pro doesn't interact with it in any way, it's completely running Unix. Only the display is re-routed. imagine if you had gigabit ethernet, you wouldn't notice any performance issues at all. However, you're still faced with the standard Unix drawbacks- no MS Office, etc, etc. We use StarOffice sometimes, but no one has a good Outlook replacement, though StarOffice 7 may have made some strides in this area. I don't think any of the free/low cost spreadsheets have a Solver function like Excel's either, which we use a lot for gear design and determining involutes.

Regards Pete Jarvis Corp

Reply to
Pete

Yes, interesting post... I remember a similar one asking about Pro/E on Linux (which is now available) and the answer was just a few years ago ...That'll never happen, since nobody would ever buy a Sun box again if Linux were available. It would be cool to have Pro/E on Mac OSX... how about Pro/Desktop??? It is BSD UNIX right... Probably would happen quick of someone like Solidworks released for the Mac. Wasn't PTC crowing about being first with Linux?

I used to run Pro/E via X using Sun to Sun boxes, and as I remember, PTC broke something at the 2001 release. I forgot what that was but the graphics capability went way down.

-D

Pete wrote:

Reply to
meld_b

I just thought I'd wright a follow up post to the what I posted a few weeks back. Since that time I now have a MAC on my desk at my office. I have a student version of Pro engineer 2001. The MAC is a G-4 with dual processors and 2 gig of ram. When I load this student version of Pro-E on my PC at home (AMD 2800+, 1 gig of ram, two 80 gig seagates RAID controlled) it works find. But the Mac seems slugish. I can see that when I start using larger assembly files it will crawl.

George Hobart

Reply to
George Hobart

OK - so here is dumb question.

HOW exactly did you get Pro/E to run on the Mac?

Dave

Reply to
Dave Bigelow

It must be run under windows emulation, which decreases the speed by about

1/2.
Reply to
Ben Loosli

Dave,

I am using a PC emulator on the Mac. The G-4 has a pretty good emulator from I hear, but the G-5 so far, does not work. It is too bad that I can not get the G-5 emulator to run because the G-5 is a 64 bit processor whereas the G-4 is only 32 bit. Once you install the emulator you then install a version of XP for the mac emulator. There are still a few problems with it for me. I am limited to only 500 meg of ram out of the 2 gig I have, and I have to make the hard drive for the emulator bigger. It is only set up as a 14 gig partition on a 120 gig hard drive. I also have to get a logitech three button mouse for it instead of the one button mouse that comes with the Mac.

Ben,

Of course it runs slower. If I had a choice to use another hardware, software combination I would have done that by now. I am being asked to use a mac instead of a PC so I will comply to the best of my ability until told otherwise. I am not being asked to commit genocide so this is an order I disagree with but will obey.

George Hobart.

Reply to
George Hobart

Ah - that is what I figured.

If I recall - there were only a couple of emulators on the market for the Mac, and Microsoft just recently purchased the main one - I wonder how long that interface will be around.

I have been running XP Pro for the past few months on a 3.06HT machine with .5G-Ram - it runs acceptably, but man there sure is a lot of stuff that just is overly complicated or just plain dead ends when using the OS in general - searching and folder management is more constrained or not as useful as 2000 Pro.

From what I have seen and touched with OSX it is obvious that it was very well thought out - and this is pretty much Apples reputation in the industry.

I used to pray for Linux support on Pro/E, mainly becasue of the anticipated performance - which is actually ended up like 20-30% faster than XP with the same configuration.

However, after seeing what Apple did with OSX, I was then praying for Pro/E to come out on OSX due to the better integration with mainstream applications and networks.

Anyway - thanks for the feedback, be happy the rest of your work is in OSX. :)

Dave

Reply to
Dave Bigelow

I just found this out about Pro/CONCEPT and was going to post it but I see David once again is on top of things... I could add that it says Jaguar & Panther (the latest MacOS) the price isn't easy to find on PTC's site but I found it somewhere saying starting at $1495. And that it is "fully compatible with Pro/E" wonder what THAT means?

-D

David Janes wrote:

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Reply to
meld_b

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