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

[evan foss <evanfoss@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 1:11 AM, igor2<igor2@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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):

That is a group of people who didn't want to learn something new. I am
not being anti windows, I just expect students to want to learn.

> - 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.

Being annoyed until you get used to a new thing is a sign of their
being inflexible. Mac users are the same way in some cases when told
they need to use their command prompt. If it is just annoying to them
they will still get their work done.

> - 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...

Again shame on them for being hostile to learning new and different things.

> - ... but "these are separate programs, tools are not integrated, omg,
> this will be very complicated how could i ever learn this?" Really, this

You as the teacher should have talked them down from this. Each tool
only does 1 thing very simply.

> 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

Seriously? Do they try to use the same tools for all tasks. How many
go home and sharpen pencils with a food processor?

> 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.

There was a time I wanted to do that. Then I realized it wasn't going
to be as flexable as using makefiles.

> - 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

Oh come on. I when I was an undergrad (which ended in May) my program
insisted we all learn autocad with the funny hotkeys and that is a
program that working in electronics I will likely never use.

> 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

The current version of autocad still uses all those funny keys but
there are also menus you can use for the same thing. Funny but I think
geda does the same thing. I have not checked all the hotkeys.

> 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

No it is a block to all users who want that speed. They could use the
graphical menus if they wanted too.

> 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

In most GUI's now the mounted file systems come up with icons on the
desktop. Since you really shouldn't work on files directly on a USB
stick I don't see the problem with copying them when they are done in
the GUI.

This could all be solved by making a live USB key with a fat32
partition to transfer files between windows and linux on.

> 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.

lol

> - 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

In class this is not an issue. If it is you need more respectful
students. They may need to look something up but firefox is still
firefox regardless of OS.

> 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

I think most of your problems were user issues not usability issues.

> 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

John Dotty made a good point that if the windows users want it let one
of them maintain it. This community exists because all of us wanted an
open source EDA tool. If people really wanted a windows one then where
are they? I only see 3 or three on this list and none of you seem to
be volunteering to help maintain a windows release.

> 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.

This I do agree with.

>
> Sorry for the long post.

Don't be I am known for my long rants in other forums and lists.

>
> Regards,
>
> Tibor Palinkas

Evan Foss

>
>>
>>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/
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> geda-user mailing list
>>> geda-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>>> http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
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