GEDA
Two major components of geda: Schematic capture with gschem and layout artwork with PCB
|
|
| Original author(s) | Ales Hvezda et al. |
|---|---|
| Initial release | April 1, 1998 |
| Stable release |
1.8.2 / September 25, 2013
|
| Operating system | GNU/Linux, Unix-like, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows (experimental) |
| Type | Electronic design automation |
| License | GNU General Public License |
| Website | www |
The term gEDA refers to two things:
The word "gEDA" is a conjunction of "GPL" and "EDA". The names of some of the individual tools in the gEDA Suite are prefixed with the letter "g" to emphasize that they are released under the GNU General Public License.
The gEDA project was started by Ales Hvezda in an effort to remedy the lack of free software EDA tools for Linux/UNIX. The first software was released on 1 April 1998, and included a schematic capture program and a netlister. At that time, the gEDA Project website and mailing lists were also set up.
Originally, the project planned to also write a PCB layout program. However, an existing open-source layout program, "PCB", was soon discovered by the project. Thereafter, the ability to target netlists to PCB was quickly built into the gEDA Project's netlister, and plans to write a new layout program from scratch were scrapped. Meanwhile, developers working on PCB became affiliates of the gEDA Project.
Other open-source EDA programs were created at about the same time. The authors of those programs became affiliated with the gEDA website and mailing lists, and the collaborative gEDA Project was born.
At present, the gEDA Project remains a federation of software tools developed by different (but sometimes overlapping) programmers. The thread which holds the project together is the shared vision of creating a powerful, community-based, open-source EDA toolkit.
Loosely speaking, the term "gEDA Suite" refers to all free software projects and applications that have associated themselves with the gEDA Project via the geda-dev/geda-user mailing lists. These include:
Within the gEDA Suite, gEDA/gaf ("gaf" stands for "gschem and friends") is the smaller subset of tools grouped together under the gEDA name and maintained directly by the gEDA project's founders. GEDA/gaf includes:
Because one of the gEDA Project's longstanding goals is to provide a suite of EDA applications for Linux, all applications in the gEDA Suite compile and run on Linux. Besides building the programs from source, binary executables for all programs in the gEDA Suite are available from popular package archives; the programs may be installed on many common Linux distributions using package management tools such as apt or dnf.
...
Wikipedia