SketchUp on Linux

Tags:

Install Trimble [formerly Google] SketchUp in a few easy steps

For simple architectural CAD tasks, SketchUp can be a useful alternative. It is certainly simple to use, and unlike Blender it's pretty obvious how to enter dimensions by typing them into a box -- really handy if you are converting an existing paper plan. I had a client send me some files in SketchUp that he wanted moved onto his website, so this was a perfect excuse to try it out.

NOTE: Google has sold this product to a company called Trimble. If you experience problems, the latest info should be on the Wine wiki.

Step 1: Install a few missing utilities

I have shown you not long ago how to use winetricks to easily obtain missing programs and libraries required by some of the Windows programs installed using Wine. Winetricks is a very smart wrapper script that will facilitate the installation of extra components, letting you focus on getting your desired application to run.

Now, to get Google SketchUp to run, you will need some fonts and Visual C libraries, as follows:

winetricks corefonts vcrun6 vcrun2005

You can download the script by being geeky and using wget:

wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks

See also, this on SysAdmin World.

When using Wine in Fedora 16 you get an error message that “Wine could not find the Gecko package which is needed for applications embedding HTML to work correctly”. It offers you to automatically download and install the package but nothing seems to actually happen since the message does not go away.

To fix this issue you can use the the script here which will conveniently install the necessary packages to /usr/share/wine/gecko/.

  1. First install cabextract.

    sudo yum install cabextract

  2. Then download the script, make it executable and start it.

    curl http://winezeug.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/install-gecko.sh -o install-gecko.sh chmod +x install-gecko.sh sudo ./install-gecko.sh

Step 2: Install SketchUp

from http://sketchup.google.com/download/

wine <Google SketchUp windows executable>

And just follow the wizard. For example, on my system:

cd "/home/bill/.wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Google/Google SketchUp 8"
wine ./SketchUp.exe

Step 2a: You may have to tweak this

I get an error saying OpenGL is not installed.

Resolution is here -- (From the Linux shell prompt) run regedit, open [HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareGoogleSketchUp6GLConfigDisplay], and change "HW_OK" to 1.