Re: gEDA-user: geda, pcb and cygwin

[Peter Clifton <pcjc2@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2007-06-20 at 14:00 +0000, Kai-Martin Knaak wrote:
> You may remember that I planned to distribute geda+pcb on virtual 
> machines to local students. This was not appreciated. A stripped down 
> linux machine turned out to be even more challenging to a windows user 
> than a full featured desktop environment :-|

I don't use the live-cd which we give our students, as I have (at least
two) perfectly good Linux installs. If you can't eat your own dog food,
its probably not good.

I've helped students use PCB under windows, and its very similar to
under Linux. Seems good - even if our in house PCB fab guys don't like
it. From a usability point of view, he does have some valid points about
Unix paradigms being present still, which may mean its harder to use for
some people.

Things like the "Buffer" menu will be unfamiliar to may windows users. I
wondered about producing a different set of menus which feel more
windows native, but don't have the time at the moment.

> Today, I tried to build the electronics tool chain under cygwin. Thanks 
> to the concise instructions in the wiki I got the geda tools to work 
> under cygwin. 
> 
> But with pcb I did not even get the configure script done. The build 
> script in the win32 dir fails to find the gd-library. In particular it 
> insists, that there it cannot find gd.h. Yes, I double checked, that it 
> is installed at the place where the build script says it looks for it. 
> The gdlib-devel package from cygwin didn't help either. 

I cross-compiled with mingw under Linux, so can't help regarding Cygwin.

> Any hints anyone?
> I'd happily take a binary version of pcb too. 

The build script in the win32 dir (close to what I did) produces a
native Win32 executable.

Win32 Native - no support offered:
http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/geda/pcbinst-1.99v.exe

Cross compiled off current CVS, as of just now. There are no source-code
mods, so I've not got a tarball at that URL. If anyone wants the hacked
build script I used to just build the installer after I manually
cross-compiled, I will send it by email on request.

If you'd like to test it, please do - I don't think printing works, and
I deliberately didn't try to compile png (or other graphics) support in
(avoiding libgd).

Whilst I say "no support", I don't mind hearing what does / does not
work.

Regards,

Peter Clifton




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