Re: gEDA-user: Installation problem - from source - SuSE 10.0 to AMD

[Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@xxxxxxxxx>]

At 22:29 10-2-2006, you wrote:
> > At 14:16 10-2-2006, you wrote:
> > > > Hi - I'm trying to install the gEDA package from source on a computer
> > > > running SuSE 10.0. I'm compiling from source rather than installing
> > > > from RPMs because I've got an AMD 64 processor.
>
> So Bill, I am curious.  Did you get gEDA installed, and did the advice
> you received on the list help?
>
> I ask because it frequently happens that folks drop into the list with
> a problem.  We give some advice, and then the people disappear.   I am
> always left wondering if our advice fixed their problem, or if they
> just gave up in installing gEDA altogether.

I've just got gEDA installed, and gschem working - I haven't yet 
checked anything else.

Clearing out the gEDA directory and re-running the 
geda-install-20060124.iso CD did solve the installation problem. I 
spent quite a bit more time finding where to put the path-setting 
export commands - SuSE 10.0 doesn't want you to put them in ,bashrc 
or .profile, and they ended up in /etc/profile.local which I had to 
create (as advised by the comments in /etc/profile).

I don't give up easily. This isn't the first time I've installed 
gEDA. That was back in 2000, and I posted a report of that experience 
on sci.electronics.cad on May 10 2000, which generated a certain 
amount of discussion.

That installation lasted a couple of years, but got trashed when I 
tired to up-grade to the next version of SuSE. By then Alex had 
hidden the gEDA code behind the CVS version control system, so I 
couldn't get hold of it from Windows machines, and I had to wait 
until I had ADSL on my home computer, so that I could down-load under 
CVS running under Linux.

That worked fine, until the next up-grade of Linux refused to 
recognise my Thompson SpeedTouch USB green frog ADSL moden. After a 
long struggle, I finally gave up and bought a Thompson SpeedTouch 516 
Ethernet modem, which SuSE 9.3 definitely recognised. That was July 
20 last year. I've been making desultory attempts to get gEDA 
installed ever since then - my downloads directory contains a copy of 
geda-install-20050329, which did get burnt onto a CD-ROM, but didn't 
install under SuSE 9.3.

I was lurking on the mailing list, and observed that I wasn't the 
only victim of that particular combination.

When I got around to trying the new iso image, I found the SuSE 10.0 
install notes much better than their predecessors. I was a bit 
surprised about having to install Gnome development on top of the KDE 
development package I'd already installed - in all the extra packages 
I had to add used up another 1.8 Gbyte of disk space, not that that 
matters with modern disks. I would have liked it if the SuSE 10.0 
install notes had mentioned that SuSE 10.0 uses the bash shell, and 
if they had saved me the trouble of working out where to set the 
environment variables.

Nobody who is in any kind of hurry is going to put in this kind of 
sustained effort. If I were more competent with Linux, it wouldn't 
have been as much of an effort, but I'm an electronic engineer, not a 
programmer (though I was pretty good with Fortran 4 in the 1960's, 
and wrote a 900 word interrupt-controlled program in assembler for a 
PDP-8 back then which did most of the data collection for my Ph.D. project).

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen