Re: gEDA-user: Greetings! I am new here

[sdb@xxxxxxxxxx (Stuart Brorson)]

> Greetings everyone,

Hello!

> I am new to this list and to gEDA as well. I have been a long time user of 
> EAGLE on windows. Early this year i transformed myself into a Linux user 
> and supporter of everything Open Source. I have since been attempting to 
> use everything FOSS. There were two applications that remained commercial 
> on my box; EAGLE and VMLAB (An AVR simulator) through WINE.
> 
> I have long been wanting FOSS alternatives for the above. Recently i 
> discovered gEDA (Wonder how i missed that before though? ;-))
> 
> I have not fully understood the gEDA package yet but from the features list, 
> i am impressed. I would however like to read any review of the package if 
> available as i was unable to find anything worth while. Something in 
> comparison with EAGLE would be excellent. Is there any?

There was an article talking about gEDA in the March 2005 edition of
Circuit Cellar.   It doesn't do a compare/contrast of gEDA against
Eagle, but it does talk about the design flow for gEDA.  More articles
will be coming out in other paper publications soon.  

You can also read the docs and wiki available on the gEDA site.

> My prime interest, as might be any body else's, is what is the learning 
> curve? does it provide all the functionality that EAGLE provides? and what 
> is the performance in comparison with EAGLE?

If you mean the free Eagle, then gEDA offers unlimited design sizes,
whereas the free Eagle is limited.  From your perspective, gEDA is
comparable to the payware version of Eagle.

That is, gEDA is a mature design environment with enough power to
enable low- to mid-level designs.  You can do 6 layer PCBs easily, and
I think some people have done 8 layer boards.  In this sense, it's
comparable to Eagle, CircuitMaker, and the like.  I'd say that you can
replace Protel and Orcad with gEDA too, with some caveats.  [1]

You will need to do a little more work with gEDA in terms of drawing
your own footprints and symbols -- the commercial pacakges tend to
have larger parts libraries.  OTOH, there are about a thousand (maybe
more) symbols and footprints already available.  Also, making symbols
and footprints isn't hard, and if you don't want to draw them yourself
you can surf around you will find lots of people giving away gEDA
symbols and footprints (and scripts to build them).   

The schematic capture program is very easy to learn and use.  No real
learning curve there if you already know how to do schematic capture.

GEDA's layout tool, PCB, is very capable and powerful.  Some people
complain about it's user interface, but those complaints are
pertainent to older versions of the program.  It's been ported to GTK
and now is reasonably easy to use.  It does present a little bit of a
learning curve, but so does any powerful layout tool.

> I use EAGLE's Auto-Router quiet often and hence would like to know the 
> performance of PCB in this regard.

PCB has an autorouter which apparently works well.  I don't use it,
but others do.

> I use Kubuntu 5.10 and my installation is hence from the Ubuntu 
> repositories.

You should search through the lists to see what prerequisite packages
you need to install in order to use gEDA on Ubuntu.  To do an install
from the CD you will need to make sure you have the development
libraries for a number of packages.  The majority of complaints I see
about gEDA these days come from people who have consumer-grade distros
installed on their machines (SuSE 9.X personal, Fedora desktop,
Ubuntu, etc.).   The consumer-grade distros often leave off important
header files and utilities used when compiling programs such as gEDA.
Some even leave off gcc!  The gEDA Suite CD installer tries to take
care of some dependencies, but these consumer-grade distros are
basically crippled when it comes to building software.  Therefore, if
you can find a pre-compiled version for Ubuntu, you might want to use
that.  

Also note that gEDA is a GTK applications, whereas Kubuntu is Qt
(KDE).  Therefore, you may need to even install the GTK stuff.

If you have another machine, I'd suggest you load it up with Fedora 4
Workstation instead of horsing around with Kubuntu.

Stuart

[1]  For example, if you want to do high-speed stuff (GHz), and need
to attach routing attributes to nets, then you can't use gEDA.  (Nor
can you use Eagle.)  GEDA also doesn't do hierarchical busses as well
as it should.   But it works great for flat designs of almost
arbitrary size.