gEDA-user: A thought on installs/deployment

["Mike Hansen" <mehansen10@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I run geda under virtualization on a windows box(yes I know pcb will compile 
and work under cygwin but gschem is left behind, the mingw compile is ages 
old, hence running on a linux box).  Up until recently I used qemu under 
windows.  Performance is so so and not really a great user experience.   
Recently I grabbed VMWare Player+one of the many distro vmware images that 
are available on the internet.  Performance on VMWare Player(it's free) is 
light years ahead of qemu, it provides a very nice user experience.  But of 
course I had to go through the whole install procedure with geda once vmware 
was up and running, the cd install choked midstream, had to do the manual 
install, tracking down rpms and source packages, all in all a real pain and 
certainly not something your novice user wants to do.  Which got me thinking 
that a very quick way to get users up and running w/o all the install hastle 
would be to create a VMWare image of a distro+geda and then make it 
available on the internet.  Perhaps we can make it available via some 
torrent so no one has to source a 1G download.  But this would be a quick 
and painless way to get users going and would be a nice way to draw Windows 
users into the fold.  Any thoughts on this one, anyone think it's worth 
putting any effort into it?  This doesn't have to be windows centric, vmware 
runs on linux also(granted it seems somewhat silly to run geda inside it's 
own vm on a native linux box).