Google SketchUp is a very popular, and free, CAD style application. So far so good, but the bad news is that it is written for Windows. The good news is that it will run under Wine with very little difficulty these days.

The first thing you must do is, of course, download SketchUp from: http://sketchup.google.com/intl/en/download/gsu.html. Next, you need to either install the latest version of Wine, or update your current installation of Wine to the most recent version. I recommend you use the Wine (Ubuntu) repo’s, how to add the repository is at: http://www.winehq.org/download/deb. To check your version of Wine, click Applications > Wine > Configure Wine,  and click the ‘About’ tab. To get SketchUp working properly, it’s best to have at least 1.1.11 of Wine.

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