How to Install Sweet Home 3D 5.3 on Ubuntu 16.04, 16.10

Sweet Home 3D is a free interior design application that helps you draw the plan of your house, arrange furniture on it and visit the results in 3D.  The latest Sweet Home 3D 5.3 was released on November 16, 2016 with various improvements and corrections.

Sweet Home 3D 5.3 Changelog:

•     Ensured that the selected items are visible in the plan after using Zoom in or Zoom out tools.
•     Changed how textures on borders of room floors are displayed so they never look distorted.
•     Displayed walls with half transparent pattern while drawing them or while placing doors and windows, when a background image is used.
•     Initialized the scale and origin of background images imported at new levels with the values of the background image available at the closest level.
•     Improved the mouse management of the virtual visitor in plan at small scales.
•     Added a Home.xml entry validated by the DTD SweetHome3D.dtd to SH3D files, and added file association for future SH3X files.
•     Added HomeObject super class to let developers manage their own properties on home objects.
•     Copied texture image files at OBJ format export instead of generating new ones.
•     Fixed the area computation of rooms drawn with a hole in their middle.
•     Fixed blocking errors that happened for textured floors in the plan with Java 7/8 under Ubuntu.
•     Fixed the color of menu items under Ubuntu and better drag and drop support under Linux using Java 8.
•     Upgraded Java 3D version to 1.6.0 fcs / JOGL 2.3.2 for Windows and Linux versions, and for the Mac OS X version run with Java 7/8.
•     Displayed Java 3D version in About dialog box.
•     Added Sweet Home 3D icon in installation folder under Linux.
•     Replaced JRE 8u74 by JRE 8u51 in Sweet Home 3D installers bundled with Java under Windows.
•     Replaced JRE 6u45 by JRE 8u112 in Sweet Home 3D installers bundled with Java under Linux.
•     Other minor bugs fixes and enhancements.

Installation instructions:

Open terminal and insert command line...

32Bit OS

$ wget https://sourceforge.net/projects/sweethome3d/files/SweetHome3D/SweetHome3D-5.3/SweetHome3D-5.3-linux-x86.tgz $ tar -zxvf SweetHome3D-5.3-linux-x86.tgz $ sudo mv SweetHome3D-5.3 /opt/

64Bit OS

$ wget https://sourceforge.net/projects/sweethome3d/files/SweetHome3D/SweetHome3D-5.3/SweetHome3D-5.3-linux-x64.tgz $ tar -zxvf SweetHome3D-5.3-linux-x64.tgz $ sudo mv SweetHome3D-5.3 /opt/

If everything goes OK. Let’s create a launcher for it so that you can start it from Unity Dash or Launcher.

Open terminal and insert command line...

$ sudo gedit /usr/share/applications/sweethome3d-5.3.desktop

Paste below content into the file and save it.

[Desktop Entry] Version=1.0 Name=Sweet Home 3D 5.3 GenericName=Interior 2D design application with 3D preview GenericName[de]=Innenraumplaner Comment=Interior design Java application for quickly choosing and placing furniture on a house 2D plan drawn by the end-user with a 3D preview Exec=/opt/SweetHome3D-5.3/SweetHome3D Icon=sweethome3d StartupNotify=true StartupWMClass=com-eteks-sweethome3d-SweetHome3D Terminal=false Type=Application Categories=Graphics;2DGraphics;3DGraphics; Keywords=interior;design;2D;3D;home;house;furniture;java;

You may grab a logo icon from web. Name it sweethome3d.png and put it under /usr/share/icons/. or copy sweethome3d.png in folder SweetHome3D-5.3
put it under /usr/share/icons/.