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.

 

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.

 

: (George Hobart) wrote:
:
: > 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.
: >
:
: 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:
http://www.ptc.com/appserver/it/icm/cda/template_lib/icm01_cda_text_w_sub.jsp?im_d
bkey=11690&icg_dbkey=21

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.

 

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.

 

We are planing on doing it on a G-4 with dual processors and 2 gig of

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

OK - so here is dumb question.

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

Dave

 

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.

 

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

 

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