The Tao of Walking Ridge

My most recent Ubuntu installation is Lucid. It has some powerful programs, but I was looking for a 2D cad program that could calculate areas and be easy to use. After trying SAGcad, freecad, and a couple others I tried QCad. It had the easiest interface that let me poke and learn. It saved in Autocad compatible formats. And it had a polygon area measurement. However, I was not able to find the icon to run the program after installing with the Synaptic Package Manager.

After some research I disovered an easy way to add the icon. First, open the terminal (the BASH terminal in Ubuntu rules) and type whereis qcad. Then open up the main menu manager and add a menu item. For the command line copy and paste the path from the terminal. Cntl C will not work in the terminal, but edit>copy does.

With the icon installed in the menu, QCad worked great. It is a great 2D cad package that can create professional drawings and also enable study of dimensions, angles, and areas.

Tags: Linux

This entry was posted on Monday, September 26th, 2011 at 11:12 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.