Re: gEDA-user: Electric clothing and gEDA at NYLUG!

[Ales Hvezda <ahvezda@moria.seul.org>]

Hi Stuart,

[snip]
>About 30 to 40 people attended the talk, a small handfull of them
>seemed like hardware designers, which is unusual since NYLUG tends to
>attract mostly sysadmins and software types.  Mikey's interesting
>clothing was the main attraction at the meeting, of course.  But
>gschem and PCB were also stars for the evening -- he showed several
>slides of his designs captured with gschem and laid out with PCB!
>Mikey also said that gschem was "great"!  You can download the slides
>of his talk from his website (browse around).  


	Woo! :)  Thanks for the talk report.  It is turning out that
the MacOSX port of gEDA/gaf and PCB is quite important as well.


>
>Apropos to gEDA, I picked up two observations from the talk and
>follow-up discussion:   
>
>1.  gEDA is apparently hard to find if you are not "in the know".
>We are apparently "buried in the noise" on Freshmeat.  That is, there
>are zillions of projects out there to do this or that.  The problem
>with Google and Freshmeat is that it is hard to distinguish the
>working and mature projects from the broken or dead ones.  Doing a
>little bit of advocacy outside the electronics-geek community for gEDA
>wouldn't hurt.   


	Completely agreed.  So, where else should we advertise?


>Interestingly, many people find the best way to find the live
>software is via a search for recent Debian packages.  The lesson here
>is:  Keep those Debian APTs fresh and up to date!


	Yes, the debian and redhat packages are very important.  I've
finding myself also installing more and more things via the automated
systems rather than installing from source.  


>2.  There is a large community of people using FOSS tools for embedded
>microcontroller developement (e.g. free compilers & PROM burners).
>Unlike the gEDA project -- which specializes in classical EDA tools --
>the FOSS embedded tools area doesn't seem to have a single place which
>gathers the tools, or even points to them.  That is, there is
>apparently no "portal" for FOSS embedded tools.


	As Karel pointed out, opencollector.org seems to be the only
central place.  Maybe we should advertise it more as well.  

Anybody else have some more ideas/comments?  Thanks.

								-Ales