Installation help

This section provides some information useful to people who want to install gEDA onto their computers.

The repository of the Debian distribution contains binary packages of the core geda/gaf tools including gschem, pcb, gnucap and gerbv. Due to license specifics some tools like ngspice might not be distributed by Debian (or might be in Debian “nonfree”). However, the geda suite will work nicely on Debian, if you have prepared your box by installing some development packages and built it yourself or installed it from somewhere else. For more detailed information, see the debian installation notes.

For RedHat distributions you may wish to download the RPM binaries prepared by Wojciech Kazubski.

Since Fedora Core 5, major parts of gEDA are available from Fedora Core Extra.

For more informations read the fedora rpm installation notes.

For SuSE and OpenSuSE distributions there are rpm packages for several gEDA related programms. They've been prepared by Werner Hoch using the OpenSuSE Build Service.

You can install the rpm packages with YaST, yum or any other installation tool. The packages are located in a yum repository at OpenSuSE or OpenSuSE mirror.

For more informations read the SuSE rpm installation notes.

For Mac OSX distributions you may wish to download the latest Fink binaries prepared by Charles Lepple. See also notes on using gEDA on Mac.

MinGW hooks are built into many of the gEDA applications. Therefore, knowledgeable individuals have been able to build, install, and run many of the tools on Windows systems. Also, the tools do run on Windows under the Cygwin environment. However, binary executables for most of the gEDA Suite are not currently distributed by the gEDA Project. If you are a developer and wish to provide ongoing support for Windows, please contact the project via the geda-user e-mailing list.

Please see the cygwin page on this wiki for more information on building gEDA using cygwin.

This worked to install geda on Windows XP on 3/9/2012:

1. Get the snapshot file “build-20120307.zip” from http://www.delorie.com/pcb/geda-windows/ into a new folder gEDA on the C:/ hard drive.
2. Extract the zipped files into the same folder (C:/gEDA).
3. Run the geda-runtime.exe file to install runtime.
4. Run the pcb-20110918.exe file to install pcb.
5. Set environment variables under control panel → system → Advanced tab
   1. Click on “Environment Variables” (at bottom)
   2. Create the following User Variables (click on “New” to create):
      1. Name: PATH Value: \gEDA\bin
      2. Name: GUILE_LOAD_PATH Value: \gEDA\share\guile\1.8
      3. Name: GEDADATA Value: \gEDA\share\gEDA
6. Copy the file “loaders.cache” from C:/Program Files/gEDA/bin and paste it into the existing folder C:/gEDA/lib/gdk-pixbuf-2.0/2.10.0
7. The gschem program now should work properly. To run it, go to folder C:/gEDA/bin/ and double-click on the file “gschem.exe”/
8. Create a subfolder C:/gEDA/Schematics, and save all of the files you create with gschem within this folder (or in further subfolders).

For those already familiar with the gEDA/gaf applications and those who need the latest stuff, access to source-code repository is available. This is the latest developer source-code version of the application.
Installation from the Unstable/Testing repository is appropriate for those:

• Seeking a solution to a specific problem that was submitted to the development team, e.g., to test the “fix” so that the developers can be informed that the “fix” works.
• With significant working knowledge of the gEDA Tools and quite some knowledge in using and installing from git.

This usually requires access to several existing designs known to work in the current stable release of the gEDA Tools, so that comparisons can be made and issues brought to the attention of the developer/user community (via the e-mail lists or the bug tracker).

Information on how to fetch the gEDA git repository can be found here.