Re: gEDA-user: Why use gEDA?

[Dan McMahill <dan@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

al davis wrote:
> On Tuesday 06 March 2007 18:52, Peter Baxendale wrote:
>
> > I think if you use Linux machines for teaching there's no
> > reason at all not to use gEDA. Unfortunately, here all our
> > teaching machines currently run Windows only, so we use a
> > rather old Windows distribution which is not entirely
> > satisfactory. 
>
>
> How about setting up a server, with remote X display on the 
> windows boxes?
>
>
> > Also, I found that students wanting to use it 
> > on their own machines were put off by the relatively
> > complicated installation, including having to install Cygwin
> > first (that is, for the majority of students who only use
> > Windows). 
>
>
> They need to learn to deal with more than one system.  Faculty 
> need to learn this too.  They need to learn it early.

and at the risk of sounding like a broken record.... a gui only 
environment just does not cut it as far as I'm concerned for lots of 
real world work.  Being literate in the use of unix like operating 
systems can be a huge benefit.

Jim Williams wrote an app note many years back that had a pair of 
photos.  I can't seem to place my hands on it so I hope I haven't 
misquoted him too much.  In the first photo there is a computer on a 
very neat table with a vase full of flowers and maybe a glass of wine. 
The caption reads something along the lines of "the cad companies would 
like you to think circuit design is neatly captured with their tools" 
and the second picture shows an old vacuum tube based tektronix scope 
with a giant mass of wires in front of it hooked up to all 4 channels 
and some empty pizza boxes on top.  The caption here reads something 
like "in the real world other approaches are often required".   I guess 
my version of that would be a GUI-only CAD flow in a GUI-only desktop 
environment in the first photo and the second photo having little 
snippets of shell scripts, awk scripts, a perl script or two and an 
emacs window.

-Dan


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