I run geda under virtualization on a windows box(yes I know pcb will compile
and work under cygwin but gschem is left behind, the mingw compile is ages
old, hence running on a linux box). Up until recently I used qemu under
windows. Performance is so so and not really a great user experience.
Recently I grabbed VMWare Player+one of the many distro vmware images that
are available on the internet. Performance on VMWare Player(it's free) is
light years ahead of qemu, it provides a very nice user experience. But of
course I had to go through the whole install procedure with geda once vmware
was up and running, the cd install choked midstream, had to do the manual
install, tracking down rpms and source packages, all in all a real pain and
certainly not something your novice user wants to do. Which got me thinking
that a very quick way to get users up and running w/o all the install hastle
would be to create a VMWare image of a distro+geda and then make it
available on the internet. Perhaps we can make it available via some
torrent so no one has to source a 1G download. But this would be a quick
and painless way to get users going and would be a nice way to draw Windows
users into the fold. Any thoughts on this one, anyone think it's worth
putting any effort into it? This doesn't have to be windows centric, vmware
runs on linux also(granted it seems somewhat silly to run geda inside it's
own vm on a native linux box).
- gEDA-user: A thought on installs/deployment Mike Hansen
