Google SketchUp 7 works on Linux Ubuntu 8.10

First of all, because google sketchup doesn't have linux installer (even linux-ers really want that), we only one option to use it, using wine. Installing wine proof to be somekind of struggling. You could mess up with it and lost about how to fix it.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=650738&page=2
Very useful if you play with wine and messed up.

I believe you linux-ers know about apt-get and sources.list editing to install wine. When you have installed it, get yourself google sketchup windows installer from its official site. The filename would be GoogleSketchUpWEN.exe. Open it using wine.

I got 2 errors before I managed to use sketchup on linux. First one kind of sending error message to somewhere else and not stopping at all. I install the newest version of wine which is still in beta version. Second is something with unable to initialize opengl. This fix is at wine official site, which is very helpful, but the troubleshooting shutdowns compiz. Compiz not that important, but quite useful if you want animated desktop. But be asure, compiz is less important than google sketchup. This is the fix :
http://wiki.winehq.org/GoogleSketchup
http://www.indragunawan.com/2008/08/google-sketchup-6-on-linux.html

Maybe google doesn't provide its software to be available on linux, but linux can provide something that enable the software to be run at linux.

You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you'll get what you need.