A new user suggests...

Hello everyone,
I downloaded CAELinux 2008 some weeks ago, and so far I'm very happy with it. I directly installed it on my HD for full peformance, and to be honest, porting from Windows was easier than what I thought and now I use it almost for everything.
My PC is a 32bit system, so there's no need to say I couldn't use CAEL2009. I would really like to see that a new 32bit CAE Linux is being made, and if it were possible to stick to PCLinux as its base OS. The new PCLinux 2010 is almost released (there's a beta available) and with many additions, in the three most typical desktop flavors. The things is that PCLinux is (to me) easier to use than Ubuntu, it has a good repository and already includes many codecs and other files making easier its installation and porting (naturally, this is personal opinion too). I've seen myself in some occations unable to use properly some applications because the versions available recquire PCLinux 2009 at least (nothing important, but upgrading the OS is not possible if I want to keep the CAE soft running).
About the software, I find it very nice and very well chosen (I also see CAEL 2009 has a nicer selection than 2008). I would like to suggest some other software to be included, which myself as Engineer have been in the need of:

Image editor: This depends on each user actually, but when writing reports I need to modify some images and photos, and many times I need more functionalities than the basic ones offered in Kview. I reccomend KolourPaint as a basic "MS Paint-like" and for more advanced CinePaint and/or MyPaint (GIMP doens't seem to work on KDE, at least to me). Other nice soft is MTPaint or Krita (for these last one, the whole KOffice is needed).

More plots creation and handling tools: Many times when I work with sampled data, I need to fit it to a function. Tools like Fityk and Labplot are excelent and small, besides being very user friendly and allowing to work with any kind of graph and function. They usually let choose the soft for the best fit (really useful feature). Also, a tool that I found very useful too is G3Data, it allows to extract points from plots saved as image files like jpg, png, etc..

Better CAD: I know this is all an unresolved issue in Linux, but there are two projects with aim to be like SolidWorks (parametric modeling): FreeCad and HeeksCad. Both use the OpenCascade library, which could come included in CAELinux too. This will solve the need for a better 3D solid tool (Salome's geometry module is nice, but it has its limitations).

LaTeX: the TeXlive environment is already replacing Tetex, so it could be a good idea to include it de facto (although not really a must, TeTex works pretty nice too). LyX is a really nice program and allows to make very good quality documents knowing little or no LaTeX at all, so it's my reccomendation for those who want something more than Writer.

Unfortuantely I'm not a programer, otherwise I would make the distro myself, but the fact is that I'm still struggling to compile OpenCascade. I only need that and then I can say bye-bye to Windows.
Keep up the good work!

César

HeeksCAD, FreeCAD, and LyX seconded.