[FEL]: Some minor updates

Here are some minor updates on the FEL:

• dinotrace – new update was pushed on testing repositories
• fped – new update was pushed to stable repositories
• geda-gaf  (Fixes broken dependency libgmp.so.3 on rawhide and FTBFS with glib headers, Fixes RHBZ#604288, RHBZ#710281, L#704829 – Refresh on in-use tab causes crashes)
• vhd2vl 2.4 – new update was pushed on testing repositories
• Fritzing will soon be part of Fedora repositories
• Toped will have a technology editor which will reduce days of porting foundry’s tech files.

Filed under: Free Electronic Lab, gEDA

FEL: Stable release of gEDA-gaf 1.6.2

geda-gaf stable release 1.6.2 will be available shortly on fedora and EPEL testing repositories. Unfiltered changes can be found here.

# yum install geda-gaf --enablerepo=updates-testing

Filed under: Free Electronic Lab, gEDA

[FEL]: Alliance VLSI, tkgate and PCB builds fixed for EPEL-5

Since more and more universities and small businesses are deploying FEL, long term support seems to be their only words to me.

Well today,we made some progress in that perspective and we are proud to claim all the gEDA-gaf collection including gerbv and PCB are available on the EPEL-5 repositories. PCB is currently under EPEL-5 testing repository.

About 70% packages of the FEL umbrella are already available for EPEL-5. As far as I have tested with commercial EDA tools, the EPEL-5 maintains compatibility and provides a common ground for those who want to have both opensource EDA tools and proprietary EDA tools (assuming they know how to get those proprietary software). Please note that FEL packages will not undergo constant updates under EPEL-5 compared to the Fedora repositories. Hence you will mostly find the support of newer standards, features and new interoperability solutions available first on Fedora, then they might hit EPEL-5 if proper testing has been carried out.

For some reason, tkgate build was forgotten for EL-5. So now it was built and pushed for EPEL-5 testing repository.

Fedora Alliance CVS devel repository got its 100th patch last month, with respect to stability on 64 architecture and we are happy that upstream has applied all our patches for alliance. We have also built this new release for all Fedora supported testing repositories and EPEL-5 testing repository. There is also a new GUI “xgra” coming with this new release which is a Graph viewer.

I’ve also decided that we will not replace Alliance VLSI by herb (which was supported to be a fork of alliance) on Fedora. Before F-11′s release, herb development was active but died out after F-11 was released. Since Alliance VLSI upstream is active and responsive to our wishes, there is currently no valid reason behind obsoleting alliance in favour of herb.

Aside this, there are a lot of new features coming with the next release for FEL-12 Livedvd, I’ll try to jot them down on the following blog posts or maybe Shakthi will blog about them too.

Filed under: alliance, eda, Free Electronic Lab, gEDA, pcb

[FEL]: gEDA-gaf 1.5.4 versus Fedora packaging

gEDA-gaf’s upstream will from now on produce one-big tarball instead of individual tarballs as it used to do in the past.

This affects fedora’s geda packages and its update process. In accordance to Fedora packaging process the following tasks ought to be made:

• file a new package review for gEDA-gaf
• obsolete all existing fedora geda packages
• ensure a flawless update

The challenge here is how to get users update their system flawlessly. I have produced test packages which I sincerely hope to receive some feedbacks as this will dictate the time taken before the next update will hit the stable repositories.

For Fedora 10 and Fedora 11 users, please add to following to /etc/yum.repos.d/gedatest.repo
# ————–
[gedatest]
name=gEDA test – $releasever
baseurl=http://chitlesh.fedorapeople.org/gEDA/$releasever
enabled=0
gpgcheck=0
# ————–

Fedora 10 users with:

• 32 bit machines : yum install gEDA-gaf.i386 –enablerepo=gedatest
• 64 bit machines : yum install gEDA-gaf.x86_64 –enablerepo=gedatest

Fedora 11 users with:

• 32 bit machines : yum install gEDA-gaf.i586 –enablerepo=gedatest
• 64 bit machines : yum install gEDA-gaf.x86_64 –enablerepo=gedatest

Looking forward for some feedbacks …..

Filed under: eda, fedora, gEDA

Using Fedora’s Windows cross compilers

Last week announced the availability of Fedora 11. This new release entails Windows cross-compilers
introduced by Fedora’s MinGW Special Interest Group.

The aim is to eliminate duplication of work for application developers by providing a range of libraries and development tools which have already been ported to the cross-compiler environment. This means that developers will not need to recompile the application stack themselves, but can concentrate just on the changes needed to their own application.

Though this feature will interest a wide range of software developers, I believe EDA vendors will also be very interested. I will demonstrate a quick example of how to use these Windows cross-compilers.

In this demo, I will use gerbv, a gerber viewer and the example “Temperature Collector” developed by Levente Kovacs.

To install gerbv on fedora,

# yum install gerbv

The above screenshot shows gerbv compiled under a normal Linux “configure && make”. Now we will compile the same gerbv for Windows.

1. Download the sources of gerbv.

2. Setup your Fedora 11 Linux

# yum install mingw32-gcc mingw32-gtk2 mingw32-crossreport mingw32-nsiswrapper wine

3. Configure Wine.

4. Extract gerbv sources.

5. Compilation of gerbv for Windows
$ cd gerbv-2.2.0
$ mingw32-configure
$ mingw32-make

The final Windows executable file of gerbv will be stored in src/.libs/ as gerbv.exe together with its DLL file, libgerbv-1.dll.

6. Launch gerbv.exe under wine

$ wine src/.libs/gerbv.exe

7. Test gerbv.exe under windows.

Under windows, extra DLLs are required and these can be downloaded from The GTK+ Project or simply from here.

The gerber files used in this example, my compiled gerbv.exe and libgerbv-1.dll can be downloaded from here.

mingw32-nsiswrapper can later be used for building automated Windows installers for distribution.

I hope this short crash course will help you. For any additional details, please join the Fedora Mingw mailing list or IRC: #fedora-mingw on FreeNode.

References:

• Fedora IRC Classroom – Using the Windows cross-compiler with Richard Jones
• Windows cross compiler Feature wiki page

Filed under: eda, edacafe, fedora, gEDA, gerbv, mingw

EDA: Temperature Collector

Levente Kovacs shares with us his Temperature Collector project, which he achieved with gEDA/gaf tools. Below you can see the screenshots on pcb and gerbv respectively:

You too can share the screenshots of your designs with opensource EDA software.

Filed under: gEDA, gerbv, pcb

gEDA Project at Ignite Boston 5

Last week, Stuart Brorson gave a lightening talk about the gEDA Project at O’Reilly company’s Ignite Boston 5 event – February 12th, 2009 – Hooley House, Boston MA.

His slides are available here.
Some photos taken at the event are available on Flickr.

In his 5 minutes presentation, he covered the different tools under the gEDA/gaf umbrella and how open hardware can be engineered. Future releases of gEDA/gaf include the 1.6 milestone of gEDA and GL support with PCB.

Filed under: gEDA

git isn’t my friend yet …

I’ve moved to Antwerpen, Belgium and finally got an internet connection. Luckily, it was just in time for F-10.

Last weekend, Thibault North and I hunted a ghost bug concerning the crash of graal, xpat and other alliance GUI. It was due to a missing requires on xorg-x11-fonts-misc. Thanks Thibault.

Afterwards, the fedora-livedvd-electronic-lab.ks was tuned to “liveuser” and fedora-base-live.ks. By the way, here is a howto create his/her own FEL livedvd. The kickstart file also provide support for certain applications (such as modelsim and cadence icfb) requiring xorg-fonts during ssh sessions. Now, FEL’s livedvd ks, I believe, is frozen and I’ll tend not to touch it again.

While updating the kickstart file for both F-10 and master git branch, I’ve discovered that git isn’t my friend, not yet. I have not fully grasp its mechanism. Well, it is now another thing that reduces my time to spend on electronic design.

Talking about electronic design, I remind you that the goal of FEL is to allow you spending more time in design rather than compiling EDA tools from scratch.

gEDA & gaf were updated to 1.4.1. Gerbv and toped have been updated as well and upstream has done a fantastic job during the recent releases.

I wrote an email to 4 mailing lists describing them, my intention to package FEL applications for EPEL. Till now the following packages are already built for EPEL: ngspice, xcircuit, toped, electronics-menu.

In the next few days, (I thought I could manage to do in one day) I’ll be updating kicad, which I’m co-maintaining with JonCiesla , since we have no news from Alain.

Tonight, we will have a FEL meeting 20h UTC on #fedora-meeting to discuss its roadmap for F-11. After having reached a maturity of about 3 years, FEL is gaining ground and respect from different parties. So for F-11, I guess it will be time for some real project management and weekly meetings.

Filed under: Free Electronic Lab, gEDA, livedvd

FEL: gerbv 1.0.3

This is to announce the fourth release in the stable branch of gerbv, 1.0.3 was just built for Fedora and will be available shortly among the updates.

This release represents a point release incorporating a few patches made against the 1.0.X source over the last 1 1/2 years. Specific updates include:

• Incorporate changes from Joost Witteveen to support extended %SR% commands.
• Fix endless loop bug when gerbv encountered an unknown % code. Patch from Joost Witteveen.
• Fixed initial scale setting for %MOMM% Gerber files. Patch from Joost Witteveen.
• Fixed format for small drillfiles. Patch from Trevor Blackwell.
• Fix setting of the initial window size when the screen is larger than the display. Patch from David Carr.

Gerber Viewer (gerbv) is a viewer for Gerber files. Gerber files are generated from PCB CAD system and sent to PCB manufacturers as basis for the manufacturing process. The standard supported by gerbv is RS-274X.

Filed under: fedora, Free Electronic Lab, gEDA, gerbv

gEDA/gaf stable version 1.2.0-20070902 released!

This morning, a stable version 1.2.0-20070902 of gEDA/gaf was released. FC-6 and rawhide packages have already been built whereas for F-7, I’m waiting for a manual override for interdependent package for libgeda.

One thing that struck me is that codes have been backported to guile-1.6 and at the same time providing compatibility for guile-1.8. Because some (older) distributions still use guile-1.6 (even the latest Ubuntu still has the old guile-1.6). Since Fedora Core 6 was released, guile-1.8 was included. Though there is a compat-guile-16, I don’t package geda against it.

The current stable series of guile is 1.8 and the current stable release of Fedora is 7.

There has been 3 or 4 releases of gEDA with a lot of cool features and many enhancements. gEDA/gaf developers are active and can be easily contacted. They have worked so hard to provide quality gEDA/gaf applications the last few months. Users of those distributions are missing a lot if they cared about quality applications for their own personal work.

Filed under: fedora, gEDA