15 Apr
2008
15 Apr
'08
9:02 p.m.
On Apr 15, 2008, at 11:22 PM, Eric Smith wrote:
If we're talking about doing PCB layout, the program you're
probably thinking of is (poorly) named "PCB", which is not part of
gEDA. They have been distributed together for the past few years
because there's significant overlap in the developer base. I use
these tools daily, so I'll blab about them a bit.
gEDA itself was pretty immature a few years ago...I played with it
a bit and dropped it back in 2004. Since then, however, a HUGE
amount of progress has been made. Right now I'd rate it as good as
or better than any commercial schematic capture package I've seen.
PCB is right up there too, but it has been there for a long time. It
got its start in the Amiga world many years ago, and has benefitted
[gEDA]
probably would be for me too, if it were to build
painlessly. That
is extremely unlikely.
I don't know. I last tried to use gEDA two or three years ago, and it
wasn't mature enough then, so I bought Eagle. gEDA is reported to be
much better now, but since I already have Eagle I'm not inclined to
try it. from very active development in the past 3-4 years in
particular.
Nowadays, both PCB and the gEDA suite are absolutely capable of
supporting commercial-level development. I know of a few people
(myself included) who have been doing real commercial design work
with them for some time.
I run these tools under both MacOS X on PPC and Solaris on
UltraSPARC, and the other engineer on my team them under Linux on
x86. They are reasonably portable and not difficult to build on a
modern system. I always build them from source.
Incidentally, the two most active developers of both gEDA and PCB
these days are DJ Delorie, of DJGPP fame, and Dan McMahill, a chip
designer at Maxim. This constitutes very serious developer
firepower, and it shows.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL