Building a gEDA box...

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) General Bar Sport
1

Hi all,

I am now at the point where I can concentrate on building my shop PC; I am set on using Linux on this box - so if you have Windows suggestions, forget them.

I am also set on using the gEDA toolchain, perhaps also KiCAD (I might try both out to get a feel for both); I am planning on a minimum of gschem, pcb, and kicad - plus the Arduino environment, open office, and a few of minor pieces of software (web browser, gnu paint, etc - nothing fancy) that would be useful for my shop machine.

This is all well and good, but now I am trying to decide:

  1. Should I go with a gEDA distro (FEL or UER)?
  2. Should I roll my own setup (ie, install a distro, then throw on the packages I want/need)?

I was wondering if anyone here had some insights, ideas, etc - I am a long time linux user (since 1995 - first install was TurboLinux 2.0 on a 486 laptop with 8 meg - recompiling a kernel doesn't scare me, though I haven't had to do it in years!); my current desktop workstation runs Ubuntu 9.04 (IIRC) - I have used RedHat, Debian, SuSE, etc - in the past...

I am just wanting an opinion from others as to what they may have done; I figure since on either the Fedora or the Ubuntu re-mix I will have to install the Arduino IDE separate (no big deal; I've had it running on my desktop since version 12) - that going with a stock install of linux then pulling down packages may be the best deal - but at the same time, I wouldn't mind trying one of the "re-mix" distros - I only know of FEL and UER:

http://spins.fedoraproject.org/fel/
http://ubuntuelectronicsremix.net/

Are there others? Something better? Part of me likes FEL, but hates that it seems to be KDE-based (?); my machine in my shop won't have much "umph", and while I have run KDE with a processor slower than what I will be using, lean-n-mean is what I would rather have. Gnome on Ubuntu is better (not the "best" though) - but UER seems like they are getting ready to release a new version, and I don't know if I want to get things all nice and set up, then "BOOM" a new version is needed - although, at the same time, they appear to be "behind"???

At this point it seems a "roll-yer-own" approach might be the better option...

:slight_smile:

2

I would use a windows xp box and eagle

(sorry I had to)

honestly I lost my OS bug years ago, I stock install ubuntu as "linux" and have not rolled my own since the mid 90's so I dont know what to tell you

3

If you're not buying leading-edge hardware that needs bleeding-edge drivers, there's usually not a lot to be gained from running the version-du-jour. Occasionally you'll find a software package that's still under heavy development that doesn't get backported to last year's Fedora or Ubuntu, but someone who's done kernel builds shouldn't be too worried about doing an app build.

I think it's possible to do a Gnome-based install from DVD. If not, you can do something like what I did: because I do some LAMP development, I installed the server version, and a few simple apt-gets installed KDE and the basic apps I wanted. There are tutorials on the official Ubuntu websites for doing that. Unless you're really hurting for RAM, I recommend against the procedure I found for installing an absolute minimum system and building on top of it: did that once, found it too tedious to get to a full system.

I'm partial to Ubuntu because I've found the conservative philosophy of the Debian folks makes for a stable base, and that the very large and enthusiastic Ubuntu community is better about backporting new versions of common apps than the RH and Fedora people were when I was using those distros.

4

I usually compile gEDA from source on Fedora and have never had a problem.
I run configure with a prefix, run make and then make install. Occasionally
there is a dependency but it has never been too bad.

I keep multiple versions of the gEDA tools istalled so that I can view boards and schematics with the version of tool they are created with.

(* jcl *)

P.S. One of the gEDA PCB developers uses Fedora (he works at Redhat)
and IIRC the creator of gEDA/gschem is a debian user.

http://www.wiblocks.com

5

Im going to have a look at UER Id never heard of it.
Ill install it under virtualbox and have a play.

How about a basic install on a reasonably specced system and running virtualisation such as Virtualbox.

That way you could have the best of all worlds and have as many of the specialist remixes and even windows available when you need them. You have to have the non open source version of Virtualbox for usb support.

I find it very useful. especialy when you need to start updating things like gcc and dont want to risk breaking your stable working install.

Gordon

6

Im going to have a look at UER Id never heard of it.
Ill install it under virtualbox and have a play.

UER seems promising, but at the same time it seems it has a "slow release" schedule; the last update was on May 1st, saying the next version of UER would be out in "a couple of weeks"...? I use Ubuntu on my main workstation at home, so I am somewhat partial to it, but I would hate to install the last version of UER, only to find a week later I needed to update or something.

How about a basic install on a reasonably specced system and running virtualisation such as Virtualbox.

Here's the thing; the box I am putting all of this on is a "throwaway" kind of box - its an old BookPC which will have a 1 GHz Celeron and 512 MB of RAM - easily enough for most distros, but I am not sure about Virtualbox (or any other virtualization).

That way you could have the best of all worlds and have as many of the specialist remixes and even windows available when you need them. You have to have the non open source version of Virtualbox for usb support.

Its an interesting idea, certainly. I do have a couple of "old" Parallax USB scopes that only have software under Windows (there's been a little work done with them in Perl or Python, I forget which, under Linux, but nothing extensive); right now they "sit in a box". They might be nice for quick/simple measurement purposes (nothing fancy, they don't have high bandwidth or anything - basically on-par with the Seeedstudio scopes).

I find it very useful. especialy when you need to start updating things like gcc and dont want to risk breaking your stable working install.

This is a good point; there have been times on my desktop install of Ubuntu of an update breaking things (not the Arduino environment, yet)...

Thanks for the tips!

:slight_smile: