Greetings. I've been on this list before, but haven't had the opportunity to actually use gschem for a real-world project until now.
I created a small computer around the W65C816 microprocessor. Please see http://www.falvotech.com/projects/kestrel/8k.php . After posting the above site, I have had a few people who expressed a desire to purchase the Kestrel 8K as a single-board computer for home-hacking and other liesurely homebrew computing fun. So, I decided to install the latest gEDA software via your distribution ISO (nice BTW!), so that I can produce a pretty-printed schematic diagram, and some get some PCB artwork created for it. It installed cleanly so far as I could tell. Loading up gschem, I see it is somewhat more refined than when I last remembered it. Although there are some UI-related issues that are outstanding to me, the program is functional enough that I am able to get useful work done. However, as you don't have a W65C816 component in your micro library, I decided to create one. I followed the instructions as described in the online documentation for creating symbols. I have attributes pinseq, pintype, pinnumber, and pinlabel defined for all pins. I have a floating refdes=U? with just the U? visible. I do have a device= and footprint= attributes as well, also with their values visible (really, is there a specific reason why I need both a hidden device= attribute and a generic text label? That just seems so wasteful to me. If this is an issue, please let me know why it is an issue, so that I have some understanding should any errors appear in the future). I also have a description= attribute, which is entirely hidden. Now, what I do to recreate my problem is this: 1. Create a new schematic in some project. 2. Place a W65C816 symbol. 3. Place a 62256 symbol of some kind. Doesn't matter which one. 4. Place a 7400 symbol. 5. Don't bother attempting to wire anything up. Just save it, and close gschem. The idea is, I want pcb to see that there are three chips. Again, baby-steps. 6. In the geda window, click on your .sch file, and instruct it to create a PCB from it. At step 6, I get the following errors: gnetlist -g PCBboard -o blah.pcb blah.sch gEDA/gnetlist version 20050313 gEDA/gnetlist comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; see COPYING for more details. This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions; please see the COPYING file for more details. Remember to check that your schematic has no errors using the drc2 backend. You can do it running 'gnetlist -g drc2 your_schematic.sch -o drc_output.txt' and seeing the contents of the file drc_output.txt. m4: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/pcb/m4/common.m4: No such file or directory Now, the problem here is, I did install my installation in my own home directory. Is this a bug, where it is trying to find common.m4 in some system-shared location? In order to perform this action, must I install system-wide? Both PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH are set correctly. I think once I get this resolved, I'll undoubtedly run into other errors, which I'll have no choice but to ask about here. But this error in particular is definitely obstructing any progress I'm having on my project. If anyone can tell me what I need to change to get it to locate the correct common.m4 file, that would be greatly helpful. Thanks. -- Samuel A. Falvo II
