No, it’s isn’t an Ubuntu flavour for computer-aided drafting. It’s a fork of a well-known community edition of QCAD. And thus the month of CAD on Linux continues.
It’s hardly news that open source version of QCad long ceased to update, with proprietary version not being financially successful. The CADuntu project is a little over a month old, and the name of the project was picked just for fun and has nothing to do with Ubuntu per se.
The point of this project is in updating source code to use Qt4, much newer version of Qt — a crossplatform development kit, and to improve the actual application.
The project was started after Ries van Twisk, its initiator, decided to simplify his work by creating a CAM plug-in for community edition of QCad. He soon figured out that creating something for an application based on an aging toolkit would lead him nowhere and thus started porting CADunutu to QT4 first.
Some bits of QCad have already been ported, some — not, but the application builds on both Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. Ries also implemented calling menu items from keyboard (here is a screencast).
There are no ready to use builds other than a month old alpha build for Mac, at least yet. If you feel brave enough, you can fetch source code from SVN and compile it:
svn co https://caduntu.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/caduntu caduntu
The project’s website is actually a blog, so you can track the progress there. As usual we are going to watch the project and keep you informed.
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