On Tue, 5 Dec 2006, Michael Sokolov wrote: >Andy Peters <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> a) (Most) Hardware guys want to design and implement hardware. Tools >> are the means to that end, not the end in itself, and we'd rather do >> our work than deal with tool build failures. > >I just feel like adding one different data point. > >I come into the world of hardware design from a software background. >And not just any software background, but specifically a religiously >zealous free software background, and specifically UNIX, all command >line and non-visual.
<snip> It's just like if you were describing me, especially the text-oriented part, 80x25 (or 80x24 on a vt terminal) forever ;) However, I admit I need to use visual tools when the task itself is visual, which is the case for laying out a PCB. As long as I find the interface comfortable (for example I can use the keyboard for giving commands to save time on clicking and use the mouse mostly for entering coordinates), I'm happy to work with an GUI on the visual part. Fortunately both gschem and pcb provides an interface I like. Btw, about the windows users, I think it's important to make the intended audience very clear. Reading back the rich mailing of the previous days, yhis mostly happened. As I think this issue would raise from time to time, it might worth to write a short summary on a webpage or a wiki or whatever is fashionable nowdays. On the other hand, it seems there's need for a windows port while there's noone has the energy and time to do it, unless paid. Maybe it would make sense to set up a sourceforge project for a native windows port and ask for donations. For example get someone who has the skills to do the port, ask him how much it would cost and then tell: "dear windows user, we collect money to pay this developer, as soon as X amount comes together, he starts working on the port." Then if there are really so many windows users, I guess they could put together the money, if not, they should go and invest even more money in buying a commercial CAD. Finally, about a live cd. Some devs may remember that I made some minor efforts in creating a working chroot environment for gEDA a few months ago. It was promoted only on the geda-dev list. Meanwhile I had to put together a live cd for my students as they have windows at home. I've spent much time on getting the CD working well, but still it has many problems. Majority of the problems are not related to gEDA or chroot, but: - as mentioned above, I'm a text console oriented guy so I don't know much about GUIs thus I have no idea what a real GUI user needs; mount is so simple that first I didn't provide a GUI tool to make my students able to mount their USB pendrives. - I use old hardware from the pentium I era, so I have no idea what to do when my kernel fails on one of the user's computer because it's the latest 64 bit processor with n+1 cores and whatever APIC/ACPI/APM/SATA totally unknown to me :) If anyone is interested I can share the chroot which can be put on any live CD or just run from HDD (it's not small, I didn't have to optimize for size as I had a whole CD). At least if there's user feedback and enough contributors, I think there's more chance to produce an usable live CD than a windows port. Windows users also should consider trying colinux with the live cd or the chroot environment, whichever is possible. The chroot stuff and/or the live CD offers "you don't need to install, there's no dependency you need to care about" thing, which is what some users want, if I got it right. Igor2 _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user