Re: gEDA-user: strange build failure

[Igor2 <igor2@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 5 Dec 2006, Michael Sokolov wrote:

>Andy Peters <devel@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> a) (Most) Hardware guys want to design and implement hardware.  Tools  
>> are the means to that end, not the end in itself, and we'd rather do  
>> our work than deal with tool build failures.
>
>I just feel like adding one different data point.
>
>I come into the world of hardware design from a software background.
>And not just any software background, but specifically a religiously
>zealous free software background, and specifically UNIX, all command
>line and non-visual.

<snip>

It's just like if you were describing me, especially the text-oriented
part, 80x25 (or 80x24 on a vt terminal) forever ;) 

However, I admit I need to use visual tools when the task itself is
visual, which is the case for laying out a PCB. As long as I find the
interface comfortable (for example I can use the keyboard for giving
commands to save time on clicking and use the mouse mostly for entering
coordinates), I'm happy to work with an GUI on the visual
part. Fortunately both gschem and pcb provides an interface I like.

Btw, about the windows users, I think it's important to make the intended
audience very clear. Reading back the rich mailing of the previous
days, yhis mostly happened. As I think this issue would raise from time to
time, it might worth to write a short summary on a webpage or a wiki or
whatever is fashionable nowdays. 

On the other hand, it seems there's need for a windows port while there's
noone has the energy and time to do it, unless paid. Maybe it would make
sense to set up a sourceforge project for a native windows port and ask
for donations. For example get someone who has the skills to do the port,
ask him how much it would cost and then tell: "dear windows user, we
collect money to pay this developer, as soon as X amount comes together,
he starts working on the port." Then if there are really so many windows
users, I guess they could put together the money, if not, they should go
and invest even more money in buying a commercial CAD. 

Finally, about a live cd. Some devs may remember that I made some minor
efforts in creating a working chroot environment for gEDA a few months
ago. It was promoted only on the geda-dev list. Meanwhile I had to put
together a live cd for my students as they have windows at home. I've
spent much time on getting the CD working well, but still it has many
problems. Majority of the problems are not related to gEDA or chroot, but:

- as mentioned above, I'm a text console oriented guy so I don't know much
about GUIs thus I have no idea what a real GUI user needs; mount is so
simple that first I didn't provide a GUI tool to make my students able to
mount their USB pendrives.

- I use old hardware from the pentium I era, so I have no idea what to do
when my kernel fails on one of the user's computer because it's the latest
64 bit processor with n+1 cores and whatever APIC/ACPI/APM/SATA totally
unknown to me :)

If anyone is interested I can share the chroot which can be put on any
live CD or just run from HDD (it's not small, I didn't have to optimize
for size as I had a whole CD). At least if there's user feedback and
enough contributors, I think there's more chance to produce an usable live
CD than a windows port. Windows users also should consider trying colinux
with the live cd or the chroot environment, whichever is possible. The
chroot stuff and/or the live CD offers "you don't need to install, there's
no dependency you need to care about" thing, which is what some users
want, if I got it right.

Igor2



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