Re: gEDA-user: gEDA just hit SlashDotOrg (why live CD wouldn't work)

[igor2 <igor2@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 1 Aug 2009, evan foss wrote:

>You know the mechanical people have a livecd or I think it is dvd now.
>Perhaps we should have an electronics live disk of some kind?

For a few semesters I was teaching gschem/pcb for undergrads. In the very
first semester I tried with live cd (one I built myself) but it didn't
work out as good as I expected. Reasons for this, in my opinion, are
little issues: some seemingly unimportant convention of windows that
windows users are so got used to that they do not want to switch to
anything else, even if what they are currently using is the worst possible
way of doing that thing. Some examples (and possible solutions):

- window manager; there are ways to make the live cd run a very similar
window manager that windows has, but it will never be the same. Any little
difference will annoy windows users.

- command line; most of windows users believe if you need to type commands
or you see a prompt, that's the sign you are doing something wrong. On
this, xgsch2pcb helped a lot but...

- ... but "these are separate programs, tools are not integrated, omg,
this will be very complicated how could i ever learn this?" Really, this
was one of the big surprises for my students, that doing different tasks
can be best achieved by using different tools. And this is not even about
hjaving back annotation, it's purely about having everything in one big
window. I am rather sure if anyone would come up with a tool that
integrates xgsch2pcb, gschem and pcb into a single window with tabs,
these users won't ever notice they are separate programs even if mouse
commands are different in each window.

- and if we are already here, the mouse. I remember I had hard time
learning PCB and gschem; all the hotkeys and "strange" mouse controls. But
when I started, I understood these all have a reason, and the controls are
optimized for smooth workflow. After the learning curve, using these
bindings are really fast. However, windows users do not care about being
fast. Really, it's not gEDA-specific. I remember the old, DOS versions of
autocad. The same story there with the command line. Those who really
learned using acad back then had one hand on keyboard, one hand on
mouse. Selecting objects and sometimes coordinates done with mouse,
actions done using the keyboard. When I got to learn autocad at the
university again, it was already a windows version: right click and a menu
pops up. This way only one hand works, and selecting the line tool or the
"perpendicular" menu item takes much longer then typing "l" or "perp". Of
course there was a command line in the windows version as well, but noone
bothered to use it, teachers didn't even teach the commands. I remember I
tried to show some of my classmates how much faster using commands can be,
but they were totally uninterested. For gEDA, I believe this is another
blocker for windows users: it is optimized for speed (of use). Of course
mouse bindings can be changed and I guess it's not a big deal to add
context sensitive menus for the right click, but without these, windows
users won't take it serious. Really, number of popups matter...

- drive letters; they do want to name their hard disk "c:" and they find
it more convenient to remember their usb pendrive as "f:" than to remember
it as "/mnt/pendrive". Even if drive letters are assigned in an
obscure way that when you insert a new hard disk as secondary master
or primary slave, half of your drive letters would be shifted. Even
if sometimes you want to have more mounts than alphabet would allow. This
sounds ridiculous, but even in my fdaytime job, where we hire programmers
and convert them to *NIX, this is one of the things that they say windows
is better for the longest time. Of course this one can be really solved
only with a native windows version.

- this one is the first issue I can even understand: if you boot a live
CD, you can not run the programs you normally run. This was not a real
problem 15 years ago, but nowdays almost everyone is constantly online and
they run their whatever network clients (chat clients, internet phone
clients, rss readers with some sort of notifications). People get used to
those little popups or blinking icons (or however they do it) and booting
a live CD means going offline with those. For me, I have an ssh session so
booting a live CD wouldn't hurt me as far as I have network and an ssh
client - but if not, I can imagine not wanting to use the live CD for
working with a CAD for a day. This could be solved if the live CD also
offered running inside colinux or something similar (maybe even autostart
a colinux or an emulator from the CD when the user inserts it).


Conclusion: I think a pure live CD won't help much. Something that
"integrates" better in the windows environment, and where integration is
not possible, something that looks and acts exactly the same way (even if
that's stupid and slow) is necessary to convience majority of windows
users to even consider gEDA. I totally agree with those who say a native
windows port would be more useful here, but even that wouldn't solve some
of the above issues. I think the real solution would be a native windows
port with a lot of things, mainly GUI-related things, totally different
from the version we use. Of course this is a support/maintenance
nightmare.

My personal opinion is that different software should do different
things. Having 10 different cads looking exactly the same, doing exactly
the same things is not very useful. I think gEDA's place is not on the
windows desktop, doesn't matter how hard we push, it's not a windows
application. If it ever will become a _real_ windows application, it's
either a fork with all the duplicate efforts involved, or we lost our good
old tools.

Sorry for the long post.

Regards,

Tibor Palinkas


>
>On Sat, Aug 1, 2009 at 9:01 PM, Bob Paddock<bob.paddock@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/08/01/2114210/Cheap-Cross-Platform-Electronic-Circuit-Simulation-Software?from=rss
>>
>> "Cheap, Cross-Platform Electronic Circuit Simulation Software?
>>
>> dv82 writes "I teach circuits and electronics at the undergraduate
>> level, and have been using the free student demo version of OrCad for
>> schematic capture and simulation because (a) it comes with the
>> textbook and (b) it's powerful enough for the job. Unfortunately OrCad
>> runs only under Windows, and students increasingly are switching to
>> Mac (and some Linux netbooks). Wine and its variants will not run
>> OrCad, and I don't wish to require students to purchase Windows and
>> run with a VM. The only production-quality cross-platform CAD tool I
>> have found so far is McCad, but its demo version is so limited in
>> total allowed nets that it can't even run a basic opamp circuit with a
>> realistic 741 opamp model. gEDA is friendly to everything BUT Windows,
>> and is nowhere near as refined as OrCad. I would like students to be
>> able to run the software on their laptops without a network
>> connection, which eliminates more options. Any suggestions?""
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> http://www.wearablesmartsensors.com/
>> http://www.softwaresafety.net/
>> http://www.designer-iii.com/
>> http://www.unusualresearch.com/
>>
>>
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>>
>
>
>
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