Introduction

Estlcam is one of the many tools in the garage cnc hobbyist’s tool belt. It is used to convert 2d images, into tool paths that are then fed directly to the cnc router. It’s great, it’s cheap, but it has one proble… It doesn’t support linux. Time for wine.

Wine is a subsystem that allows windows system calls to be translated into linux system calls. It is not an emulator (Wine Is Not an Emulator), but will allow us to run native windows programs on linux with minimal issues.

Installation

So far I have only had luck with 3d bit estlcam. Additionally although this guide is for Archlinux, its really distro independent as long as you use your specific package manager to install wine and winetricks. Your mileage may vary.

1. sudo pacman -S wine winetricks. First we need to install wine and winetricks. Winetricks is like a packagemanager for windows and wine. It can be used to install dotnet, and all the windows dependencies that Estlcam requires.

2. WINEPREFIX=~/.wine32 WINEARCH=win32 wineboot. Here we set the location that we would like wine to use, as well as the architecture that we want wine to support. We then call wineboot which initializes the ~/.wine32 wine instance.

3. WINEPREFIX=~/.wine32 WINEARCH=win32 winetricks dotnet40 gdiplus d3dx9_36. Here we install the individual dependencies of Estlcam.

4. Download estlcam. Make sure that you install the 32 bit version of Estlcam. I didn’t have luck when trying to install the 64bit version.

5. WINEPREFIX=~/.wine32 WINEARCH=win32 wine ~/Downloads/Estlcam_32_11041.exe. Here we are running the Estlcam installer that we previously downloaded.

6. WINEPREFIX=~/.wine32 WINEARCH=win32 wine ~/.wine32/drive_c/Program\ Files/Estlcam11/Estlcam32.exe. Lastly if everything went smoothely we can run Estlcam!

There are some caveats to this installation. So far I have had limited success when it comes to using fonts with Estlcam. It may be a better idea to utiliize fonts in your CAD tooling instead of Estlcam (CAM).