Re: gEDA-user: A thought on installs/deployment

[Dan McMahill <dan@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mike Hansen wrote:
> 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).

I wonder how much work really may be needed for geda to work under 
windows.  As far as pcb, there is really only one thing left that I'm 
aware of which keeps it from just working as a native windows app 
(linking with the native windows gtk).  Of course cygwin is an option in 
the mean time.

I suspect that geda for cygwin would not be too hard but perhaps that is 
no less a pig than vmware+[some free unix like os].

-Dan