Lego Digital Designer

Lego Digital Designer on Ubuntu

Posted At : August 28, 2010 7:48 AM 3 Comments
Having seen the Lego Digital Designer I wanted to see if I could get it to run on Ubuntu, as there is a distinct lack of windows machines at home for my son to use.

It was all relatively painless and it's quite amazing how far Wine has come.

Installing Lego Digital Designer

Go to the Lego Digital Designer site and download the Windows version.

I got LDD 3.1.3 which was the latest version available at the time.

Now - to make it all work you need to install Wine and I used the latest version from the wine PPA team.

Add the wine ppa:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
[sudo] password for markl:

You'll then see:
Executing: gpg --ignore-time-conflict --no-options --no-default-keyring --secret-keyring /etc/apt/secring.gpg --trustdb-name /etc/apt/trustdb.gpg --keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg --primary-keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv 883E8688397576B6C509DF495A9A06AEF9CB8DB0
gpg: requesting key F9CB8DB0 from hkp server keyserver.ubuntu.com
gpg: key F9CB8DB0: public key "Launchpad PPA for Ubuntu Wine Team" imported
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg: imported: 1 (RSA: 1)

Now to update the list of available software:
sudo apt-get update

And then install wine and winetricks
sudo apt-get install wine winetricks

Wine lets you run Windows software on other operating systems, in this case Ubuntu.

Wine tricks provides a simple way to install native versions of some of the libraries that are not 100% compatible - by looking at the Wine App DB I discovered that it had problems with missing font's (Tahoma) and scrolling which was fixed by installing Quartz.

winetricks tahoma quartz

Then install double click on the install file for LDD and it should be up an running in no time.

If you get a warning about it not being Executable you may need to right click on the application and select Properties - and then from the Permissions tab select "Allow executing file as program"

Son is now very happy with Lego Digital Designer :-)