CAD tools on Laptop experience (Ask anything)

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Since there are so many people want to install CAD tools on their Laptop and most of them donot know how to do that . Let me tell you about my experience

1. You need to find a Notebook with a Good VGA card which is comptable with you Linux kernel and XFree86 . I recommend IBM R50 or R51 which have Radeon 9000 or Radeon 7200 VGA card . If you want to buy another fancy one , i recommend you think twice before you buy it because it may cause lots of trouble unless you think you have that kind of ability to handle it . You may also consider about Toshiba's highend line laptop . The most important thing to keep in mind is to choice the VGA chip in the laptop

2. Most of EDA tools vendor said they only support Redhat Linux 7.2 . Yes , they did . I tried lot of tools on Redhat 7.X series and all of them works well , but if you use them on Redhat 9.0 , i can not guanrante about that .

CAD tools on laptop step2

Although you can update your XFree86 for your Linux , the system still may unstable caused on other unknow issue .

I installed the Mandrake 9.2 on my R50 and without stability issue .
The VGA chip is Radeon 9000 so you can buy other brand notebook and install the same os with me

After installed the OS , now you can try to install the EDA tool you want .

Some of them may complain they can not find some librarys but you dont need to worry about this . you can find most of the package in the CD and only a small part of the tools you will need to download from internet . you can check RPMFINDER website to download the library you need .

The CAD tool i tried on Mandrake 9.2 on R50 is list in below
1. Design Compiler
2. Novas Verdi and Debussy
3. Mentor Design Architecture
4. Mentor HDL designer
5. Mentor Calibre
5. Mentor layout tool
6. VCS
7. Vera
8. Astro
9. HSIM
10 . HSPICE
11 . SPICE Explorer
12. Modelsim
............

Radeon 9000 is not good
better 7500

I thought the redhat 7.2 will have a lot of problem with M9 graphic card

Hello,

I know that this is an old thread, but I have some questions I heed answers for them.

First Is centrino processor with 2 MB cache will be a good choice for CAD tools in term of speed of simulation?

Is there will be a problem with the intel graphics processor chip with linux?

i friends i bought compaq presaro 2100 laptop of amd athlon 2800 xp with 512mb ram and ati radeon igp 320m vga card.i wanna work eda tools in this laptop. i try to install redhat enterprise edition 3 to this laptop . it find the vga card, but it cant find monitor driver. where i can find monitor driver.
pls give ur commends.
thanks

Hi,

First we should do is to see if the Laptop has a standalone graphic chip (from ATI and nVidia). Integrated graphic chips such as those from Intel often induce some additional works.