1 ==============================================
2 'gschem and Friends' Electronic Design Suite
3 ==============================================
5 Copyright (C) 1998-2015 gEDA Developers
10 The GPL Electronic Design Automation (gEDA) project has produced and
11 continues working on a full GPL'd suite and toolkit of Electronic
12 Design Automation tools. These tools are used for electrical circuit
13 design, schematic capture, simulation, prototyping, and
14 production. Currently, the gEDA project offers a mature suite of free
15 software applications for electronics design, including schematic
16 capture, attribute management, bill of materials (BOM) generation,
17 netlisting into over 20 netlist formats, analog and digital
18 simulation, and printed circuit board (PCB) layout.
20 The gEDA project was started because of the lack of free EDA tools for
21 POSIX systems with the primary purpose of advancing the state of free
22 hardware or open source hardware. The suite is mainly being developed
23 on the GNU/Linux platform with some development effort going into
24 making sure the tools run on other platforms as well.
26 The gEDA/gaf suite (this package) provides schematic capture,
27 netlisting, bill of materials generation, and many other features.
29 Tools in the gEDA suite
30 =======================
32 The major components of the gEDA suite are:
35 A library of functions for manipulating gEDA schematics and symbols.
41 A spreadsheet-like program for bulk editing of component attributes.
44 A highly-flexible, hierarchy-aware utility which parses schematics
45 to generate a number of outputs, including netlists for a wide
46 variety of PCB layout tools. It can also generate bills of
47 materials and DRC reports for your schematics.
50 A command-line utility for streamlining the workflow where `PCB'
51 <http://pcb.geda-project.org/> and `gschem' are used together.
54 A utility for checking for common errors in schematic symbol files.
57 A utility for interactive and batch mode working with gEDA Scheme
58 API, exporting schematics into various formats, and
59 configuring all the programs of the suite.
64 The information in this section is intended to supplement the
65 information in the `INSTALL' file.
70 In order to compile gEDA from the distributed source archives, you
71 *must* have the following tools and libraries installed:
73 - A C/C++ compiler and standard library (GCC/glibc are recommended).
75 - The `pkg-config' tool for managing shared libraries.
76 <http://pkgconfig.freedesktop.org/>
78 - Guile ("GNU's Ubiquitous Intelligent Language for Extensions"),
79 version 2.0.0 or later. <http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/>
81 - GTK+ (the Gimp Toolkit), version 2.18.0 or later.
84 - GNU `gettext', version 0.18 or newer.
85 <http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/>
87 - The `lex' tool for generating lexical scanners. The `flex'
88 implementation recommended. <http://flex.sourceforge.net/>
90 - The `awk' tool for data processing. GNU Awk (`gawk') is
91 recommended. <http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/>
93 - The CPython interpreter, version 2.7, including the development
94 headers. <https://www.python.org/downloads/>
96 The following tools and libraries are *highly recommended*:
98 - GNU `troff' (`groff'). <http://www.gnu.org/software/groff/>
100 - The freedesktop.org MIME info database.
101 <http://freedesktop.org/Software/shared-mime-info>
103 - The freedesktop.org utilities for manipulating .desktop files.
104 <http://www.freedesktop.org/software/desktop-file-utils>
106 The following tools and libraries are optional:
108 - `libstroke', a stroke and gesture recognition library. If this is
109 available, gschem will support mouse gesture recognition.
110 <http://www.etla.net/libstroke/>
112 - The `doxygen' API documentation tool. This is required for
113 building the gEDA developer API documentation, not for the regular
114 user documentation. <http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/>
116 - `Inkscape' or `ImageMagic' for svg to png or pdf conversion
117 This is required for building the gEDA developer API documentation,
118 not for the regular user documentation.
119 <http://inkscape.org/>
120 <http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php>
122 - `Graphviz' for drawing directed graphs.
123 This is required for building the gEDA developer API documentation,
124 not for the regular user documentation.
125 <http://www.graphviz.org/>
127 Troubleshooting dependencies
128 ----------------------------
130 "I've installed the `libfoo' library, but `./configure' isn't
133 Many modern operating system distributions split a library into two
136 1. a `libfoo' package, which contains the files necessary to
137 *run* programs which use `libfoo'.
139 2. a `libfoo-dev' or `libfoo-devel' package, which contains the files
140 necessary to *compile* programs which use `libfoo'.
142 If you're having problems, make sure that you have all of the
143 necessary `dev' or `devel' packages installed.
145 Installation from a source archive
146 ----------------------------------
148 First extract the archive to a sensible place:
150 tar -xzvf gEDA-gaf-<version>.tar.gz && cd gEDA-gaf-<version>
152 Run the configuration script. You'll probably want to specify a
153 custom directory to install gEDA to, for example:
155 ./configure --prefix=$HOME/geda
157 You can then compile gEDA:
161 And install it (if you used a `--prefix' outside your $HOME directory,
162 you may need to run this as root):
166 For more information on installing gEDA, see the `INSTALL' document.
168 Installation from the git repository
169 ------------------------------------
171 gEDA uses the `git' version control system. If you wish to try out
172 the very latest version of gEDA, you will need to install some extra
173 tools *in addition to* the ones listed above:
175 - The `git' version control tool, version 1.6 or newer.
176 <http://git-scm.com/>
178 - GNU Automake, version 1.11.0 or newer.
179 <http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/>
181 - GNU Autoconf, version 2.60 or newer.
182 <http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/>
184 - GNU Libtool. <http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/>
186 - GNU Texinfo documentation system.
187 <http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/>
189 Note that on some distributions the TeX support for Texinfo is
192 Once you have these installed, you need to clone the gEDA `git'
195 git clone git://git.geda-project.org/geda-gaf.git
197 To generate the configure script, run:
201 You can then procede to configure and build gEDA as described above.
202 For more information on working with the gEDA `git' repository, see
203 <http://wiki.geda-project.org/geda:scm>.
205 Building gEDA developer API documentation
206 =========================================
208 Several of the gEDA libraries and applications have doxygen API
209 documentation available. To generate the API documentation from the
210 source code, install doxygen (see `Dependencies' above). Next, add
211 `--enable-doxygen' to your configure command line, i.e.:
213 ./configure --enable-doxygen
215 To compile the documentation (quite a slow process), run:
219 The documentation can then be found in:
221 */docs/html/index.html
222 */docs/latex/refman.pdf
224 Some modules don't automatically generate the PDF version of the
225 documentation. If you want them you have to build them explicitly,
228 cd gattrib/docs && make refman.pdf
233 There are several ways to get help with installing and using gEDA:
235 - The gEDA website <http://www.geda-project.org> has more extensive
236 information on the gEDA tools, and links to some successful
237 projects which use gEDA.
239 - The gEDA documentation wiki contains a large amount of helpful
240 information. A static copy is included with this distribution; see
241 the `docs/wiki/index.html' file. The wiki is accessible online at
242 <http://wiki.geda-project.org/>.
244 - If the resources above didn't help you resolve your problem, or you
245 are having a *design* problem that you want to get help with,
246 consider subscribing to and posting your question to the
247 `geda-user' mailing list.
248 <http://wiki.geda-project.org/geda:mailinglists>
250 - Alternatively, you can add your question to the gEDA Answers page
251 on Launchpad. <https://answers.launchpad.net/geda>
253 - If you have discovered a bug, have a feature request, or have
254 written a patch to gEDA, please create an item on the gEDA Bugs
255 page on Launchpad. <http://bugs.launchpad.net/geda>
260 gEDA/gaf (this package) is freely distributable under the GNU Public
261 License (GPL) version 2.0 or (at your option) any later version. See
262 the `COPYING' file for the full text of the license.
264 The programs and associated files are:
266 Copyright (C) 1998-2013 by Ales Hvezda and the respective original
269 See the `AUTHORS' file for a more extensive list of contributors to