Folks---

I recently stepped into my local sewing machine dealer while doing laundry today, and got a wonderful demo of one of the Janome embroidery/sewing machines. It's pricey, but nice. There's only one really huge downfall:

No Linux software.

Sure, the thing uses standard CF cards (with a PCMCIA adapter for the machine), so it's no problem for me to find designs online and get them to the machine using my Linux box. I do, however, want to do more than that.

Does anyone know if there are any Linux software packages out there that work with small-scale embroidery machines? I'm not too worried about whether or not Janome is supported, just whether or not I can avoid installing and tweaking WINE (the only concession to Microsoft I've made since going linux is maintaining my hotmail account) in order to use embroidery machine software.

If such is unavailable, does anyone happen to know where I might find the specifications for the popular embroidery machine formats?

Thanks,

Henry C. Gernhardt, III

Henry,
Did you ever find a package that works in Linux (Redhat or Ubuntu)?

Cheers
Paddy

I know this is an old post, but just wanted to give an answer to any that might find this thread.
I am the owner of the open-source Embroidermodder application, it is an embroidery software that can read a wide variety of formats. Currently we can save to the majority of popular home embroidery formats.

We will be releasing an alpha version 2 of Embroidermodder soon. We use Qt as the front-end and cross-platform C on the back-end, so we can run on Windows, Linux/Unix, Mac, and a theoretically on many others but are currently untested.

Take a look and see if it does what you want, otherwise we are an active project and should be able to focus on any particular issues that you might have.

Project home: http://embroidermodder.sourceforge.net/
Binary files: http://sourceforge.net/projects/embroidermodder/files/
Current cross-platform source: https://github.com/Embroidermodder/Embroidermodder

Interesting.

Maybe I'll try it on some of my mothers systems.