Download

From FreeCAD Documentation
Revision as of 02:51, 17 February 2010 by Lhagan (talk | contribs)

There are several downloads for various operating systems available. Before downloading keep in mind:

FreeCAD is still in ALPHA state and not ready for end user usage

official FreeCAD installers

These are ready-to-install packages for Windows (2000 & XP, and Vista), and for Debian-based Linux systems. The installer may work on older Windows platforms, but has not been tested yet. You need Windows Installer V1 on your system (msiexec.exe). See Installing on Windows for details about different installation options. Download the latest .msi file for windows systems, or the appropriate .deb file for your version of Ubuntu or Debian.

Note for linux users: The pivy python module is needed by FreeCAD from version 0.9 or above. If it is not available on your system, you must download it from here too.

unofficial FreeCAD builds

These are versions of FreeCAD built by other persons and not officially maintained by the FreeCAD team. They may include customized parts or be optimized for certain types of processors.

FreeCAD documentation

The user documentation of FreeCAD is being written on this wiki site. You can grab a copy of the documentation in its current state, compiled in a .chm (windows help) file from the official page. Be aware, though, that the documentation is constantly evolving, and that the chm version might be a bit out of date. The best way to get up-to-date documentation is to read it online on the Online Help Toc page.

Note: The documentation system of FreeCAD is currently being rewritten to take advantage of the Qt help system, and the chm format is being dropped, so the chm docs that you can download below is likely out-of-date. For who is interested in exploring the internals of OpenCasCADe, below is a link to a chm document of the 5.2 version, more convenient than the current version doxygen-generated documentation.

FreeCAD Source package

For all other platforms you need to compile FreeCAD on your own from the Source package. You might also want to compile FreeCAD yourself if you want to optimize certain things, or customize certain parts of FreeCAD. Instructions for compiling can be found on the CompileOnWindows and CompileOnUnix pages. You can grab a zip file containing the latest official version here:

Alternatively, you can also download latest source code from the SVN repository. You'll get a more recent version, but it might contain bugs or even fail to compile. Instructions for accessing the SVN repository can be found here:

FreeCAD LibPack

To collect all the needed libraries to compile FreeCAD can be a time consuming task. So we deliver a convenient package for development on Windows (VS8) with all needed libraries. You can download the latest version of the libpack from

For linux, you will normally find all necessary libraries in your software management system, so you should just read the CompileOnUnix page.

Additional modules

There are additional modules, addons of plugins for FreeCAD developed outside of the main FreeCAD development team. They are listed here but are not officially supported by the FreeCAD team.

  • Fold module: a module in development for working with metal sheets.