Hi all,
Let me answer the questions asked in the last few posts.....
'I looked this up when I first found out about the sponsorship. Unfortunately, PTC doesn't produce a version of the student edition of Pro/E that runs (natively) on Linux - they only do this for commercial versions. So those of us who were hoping to be able to run it on Linux are out of luck.'
PTC's response - Pro/ENGINEER was ported to Linux over 5 years ago and was the first main stream CAD/CAM/CAE solution to offer support on Linux. This was a response to our commercial customers desire to run Pro/E on that OS. Once released we saw very little uptake on this OS. In actual fact, we have more people moving to our 64-bit Windows version of Pro/E. At this time, we have the following breakdown - 85% Windows, 15% UNIX and less the 1% on Linux. Even from the education market, we are not getting a lot of demand. As a result, PTC will no longer be releasing or supporting a Linux version of Pro/ENGINEER with it production release of Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 4.0.
PTC chose to only provide a 32-bit Windows version of Pro/ENGINEER for education as that was the OS being used by over 95% of our 15,000+ schools involved in our education program.
1) It is not compatible with Firefox? and I know a lot of my team members use it (don't like explorer)
2) As was stated earlier, I don't know if we can count on it to be available in months and years to come
PTC's response - PTC is working on supporting Firefox for Windchill ProjectLink. Agreed many teams are using Firefox and in actual fact are using ProjectLink as well. As it is not official supported, there might be a number of commands that might not operate or function properly. However, your overall experience should be the same as if you were using IE.
This is the first year of many to come supporting FRC. Next year, we will be using the latest release of Windchill ProjectLink available at that time. We are confident that Firefox will be officially supported for that year’s competition. Some of the other items we are considering to add will be the Workgroup Manager support for Solidworks.
'How long will the server be available?'
PTC's response - PTC will maintain the server for one month after the competition ends. PTC will send out an email to all registered teams that they should backup their work to their local machine using the export function in ProjectLink. This function will export all content and maintain the folder structure. At the end of that one month, the server will be taken offline and formatted, preparing for the next years competition.
If you have further question, please let us know. You can contact PTC directly at
firstsupport@ptc.com.
Regards,
Mark Fischer
Director - PTC Education