Latest gEDA

[calvinthomas]

This is my first ever how-to and i'm not sure if its useful to people but its taken me forever to get this working so I thought i'd try and save everybody else the effort.

Note: This is only useful for Dapper for Edgy the latest version is available in the repositories.

Note: Scripts are provided by Adrian Nania which are a lot easier and probably better than my method, they didn't work for me the first time I tried but I think that is me giving up to soon or my computer rather than the script. When I tried again on a fresh dapper install they worked perfectly, If you have problems, the method described below should work.

Note: My method installs the very latest version of this software and have been told in a following post that there are some bugs in it. For a stable release use the cvs script provided by Adrian, for a script for the unstable try the CD version (I THINK this is correct, awaiting verification as I have not tried the CD script)

Note: If you have tried my method and had problems with dependencies, thanks to Adrian Nanias' script I have updated the list of dependencies at the start which hopefully will solve problems.

Note: While I have tried my best I may have missed out a required sudo command in some places, if it doesn't work without try adding sudo, also if you need to please let me know so I can update accordingly.

Warning: This method takes a long time (about 50mins on my Turion 3000+, 512Mb RAM) and requires a fairly large download (129Mb)

Thanks to UofLSpeed and Klitz who gave me advice while I was working through it.

If your not worried about the latest version then gEDA is available in the repos, however its over a year old.

Now we need to get a bunch of dependencies, paste this into a terminal:

sudo apt-get remove -y automake1.4
sudo apt-get install -y autoconf libtool guile-1.6 guile-1.6-dev libgtk2.0-dev latex2html groff \
tetex-base tetex-extra libgdk-pixbuf2 libgdk-pixbuf-dev libglib2.0-dev build-essential \
automake1.9 libreadline5-dev tcl8.4-dev libwxgtk2.6-0 libwxgtk2.6-dev texinfo flex cvs \
libgd2 libgd2-dev tcl8.4 tcl8.4-dev tk8.4 tk8.4-dev bison gawk libxaw7-dev libedit-dev \
ssh libguilegtk-1.2-0 libguilegtk-1.2-dev libxml2-dev libglade2-dev libgtkextra-dev \
xaw3dg xaw3dg-dev guile-gnome0-gtk libgtk+2.0-directfb0 libgtk+2.0-directfb-dev \
libgnome2-0 libgnome2-dev gettext gettext-base readline-common libreadline5 pkg-config \
gdk-imlib11 gdk-imlib11-dev libgdk-pixbuf-gnome2 libgdk-pixbuf-gnome-dev make gcc \
colorgcc
sudo apt-get remove -y automake1.4
# for pcb:
sudo apt-get install -y ssh libgd2 libgd2-dev tcl8.4 tcl8.4-dev tk8.4 tk8.4-dev bison gawk
# for ngspice
sudo apt-get install -y libxaw7-dev libedit-dev
# for gwave
sudo apt-get install -y libguilegtk-1.2-0 libguilegtk-1.2-dev
# for gtkwave
sudo apt-get install -y libxml2-dev
# libxaw7-dbg libxaw-headers xaw3dg xaw3dg-dev ?

First things first from the repositories install gEDA and gwave. This is necessary as I haven't found another way to get the gEDA package manager or gwave. Note: I have not tried just installing these, I installed every package as its small and I wasn't worried about harddisk space, I don't however think its necessary, if you have problems try installing all of the packages first.

sudo apt-get install geda gwave

Note: this will also install gschem, unfortunately we are going to have to let it do this.

Now go here: http://www.geda.seul.org/download.html and download the gEDA Suite ISO (Note this is a fairly large download 129Mb)

Either mount or burn this ISO file, I find it easier to mount like this:

sudo mkdir /media/iso
sudo modprobe loop
sudo mount file.iso /media/iso/ -t iso9660 -o loop

where file.iso is changed for the ISO file of gEDA

Now navigate to the mounted ISO and type:

installer --verbose --log

If you have any problems you can leave out the log part (I had to do this but UofLSpeed did not)

You should get a GUI installer which is very simple, follow the instructions of this.

Note: If you have missing dependencies (i.e. it fails to install things let me know what the error was and i'll see if I can find what you need to install, alternatively search on google for the missing part and you'll find it (I did anyway!)

I installed it to this directory: /home/user/ but you can install it wherever you want.

Now you must edit /etc/environment:

sudo gedit /etc/environment

and add these lines, editing the directory where necessary (as per where you installed it)

PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/games:/home/username/gEDA/bin"
LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/home/username/gEDA/lib"

Finally we need to install Easy Spice, to do this we are going to compile it from source directly.

Paste this into a terminal to retrieve the file:

wget -c http://superb-west.dl.sourceforge.ne...e-0.6.7.tar.gz

Now extract the file (I do this by right clicking on the file and clicking extract here)

Navigate to the directory in the terminal and type:

./configure

make

sudo make install

You now have everything installed and configured.

Now go to the geda-install directory (where you installed from the ISO) and in there is a bin folder. For me this is:

sudo nautilus /home/calvin/geda-install/bin

copy all of the files from there.

Now in the terminal type:

sudo nautilus /usr/bin

and paste all copied files there, overwriting if necessary.

Now you can start the geda project manager by typing geda into a terminal or from the run application dialog.

To check this has worked, try opening all the applications that are in the Tool menu.

If it does, enjoy!

Any problems or easier ways to do any of this please let me know!

[calvinthomas]

I have added the link for the ISO file that I missed out and also, added a not that root access is required so commands should be entered with sudo.

Calv

[Adrian Nania]

An updated version of gEDA-CVS-ubuntu can be found attached as tar.gz archive at:
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthre...highlight=geda

Some errors were corrected. the script is up to date as of today, 20061222

[Adrian Nania]

for gEDA-CD-ubuntu:

This is really sad, the CD version of gEDA is useless for quite a while.
Too many packages are missing and not installed because of many errors.
I recommend installing gEDA from CVS and/or the latest available package.
Here are the same bugs but is a lot easier to fix them.
See the gEDA-CVS-ubuntu.txt.tar.gz file.

[Adrian Nania]

Soon I will extend the gEDA-CVS-ubuntu.txt.tar.gz file to include some extra packages

[nrayever]

thanks for this howto calvinthomas!! and let's see how much time it's going to take on my centrino duo + 1gb of ram. i believe that there's a lack of programs for electric/electronics in linux. maybe we should need to work in some more programs. hope someday this change.

sincerly nrayever

[calvinthomas]

oops! looks like a few special characters are replaced by "smelly" faces.
attached are the real scrips I am using.

The script isn't working for me but its probably just my machine, it gets to the installing Geda, this takes 6mins on AMD 64 and then doesn't do anything! Nevermind the version i've got seems ok to me (i'll never use it, its for my Dad, he's an electronics engineer, i'm a Maths student!)

I've put a bold note about your script at the top of the first post so other people can use it if it works for them, which hopefully it will because then its easier for them.

Also I have updated my post with the dependencies from the start of your script as it is more complete than mine. Hope that is OK.

Calv

[calvinthomas]

thanks for this howto calvinthomas!! and let's see how much time it's going to take on my centrino duo + 1gb of ram. i believe that there's a lack of programs for electric/electronics in linux. maybe we should need to work in some more programs. hope someday this change.

sincerly nrayever

No problem, it does seem a shame there are so few. Its not my type of software (I did it for my Dad) but its a shame this type of software is so lacking, there is the proprietry Eagle which is apparently quirky but excellent but Geda seems to be the best of the open source and my Dad said it seems good! He prefers ares & isis in windows as its so easy to use. Its very expensive though.

Let me know how long it takes and whether it works!

Note: If you had trouble with dependencies, I have updated the dependencies at the start thanks to Adrian Nanias' script.

Calv

[Adrian Nania]

Note: Scripts are provided by Adrian Nania which are a lot easier and probably better than my method, they didn't work for me but I think that is me and my computer rather than the script. If you have problems, the method described below should work.

I am not sure how fast is that computer. For example, the original gEDA installer is calling for something like one hour to install gEDA. On my computer each package needs around 6 min. Even if the shell is asking you to wait and seems like is doing nothing, for the CVS version, check the real time log files:
$HOME/gEDA.log
$HOME/pcb.log
$HOME/gerbv.log
$HOME/ngspice.log
$HOME/easy_spice.log
$HOME/gwave.log
$HOME/gtkwave.log
You will be able to see here what is happening, just refresh from time to time. I choose to work with log files not direct messages to keep the result. My computer is am AMD64 with kernel K7, I installed gnome and KDE.

[estratos]

I'm trying to install the last version of gEDA with Adrian's script. Meanwhile, Calvin, your father maybe could try KiCad (http://iut-tice.ujf-grenoble.fr/kicad/). It's a very good GNU Schematic/PCB editor for Windows and Linux (based on wxWidgets) that works really well and is very easy to install.

I'll let you know if I have any problem with the instal of gEDA.

Regards,

Daniel.