Mail Archives: geda-user/2016/09/19/09:17:43
On 09/16/2016 11:31 PM, gedau AT igor2 DOT repo DOT hu wrote:
> pcb-rnd code base got some cleaning recenlty, which together with the
> earlier unglib, scconfig and ANSI C89 porting efforts resulted in that I
> managed to compile it on an old SGI Indy box running the original IRIX
> system - with absolutely no GNU installed.
>
> A screenshot of a remote X session:
> http://igor2.repo.hu/tmp/pcb-rnd-irix.png
>
> There are still a few minor issues to fix but we are very near to
> compile out-of-the-box on such old UNIX systems (with the lesstif HID
> using motif, and with batch mode). All plugins compile, except for the
> gtk and the puller.
>
> If you are still using your favorite SunOS or AIX or IRIX or whichever
> non-mainstream-Linux/BSD system and want to edit your PCBs on it, please
> contact me. (If you have a BSD and pcb-rnd doesn't work out-of-the-box,
> please file a bug report.)
This is a fantastic idea, I'm really glad you are doing this. This
is, IMO, the very best way to test portability: to actually PORT.
Some personal history with PCB...PCB became a de-facto Linux-only
package several years ago. I started using it around 2003-2004 on my
primary desktop machine at the time, which was an SGI Octane running
IRIX. I had a bunch of Sun Ray thin clients around the lab, backed by a
large (16 CPU) Solaris system, and I ran PCB on those occasionally as
well. Everything was great. Then a large spurt of development
happened, and with each subsequent snapshot it became harder and harder
to get it running on something that wasn't a PC running Linux. I didn't
have (and didn't want) any PCs, and being a commercial UNIX guy I wasn't
terribly interested in Linux either.
Well now I'm much less opposed to Linux (though Solaris still does all
the heavy lifting around here, server-wise) and PC hardware finally
became almost powerful enough to be useful (with the introduction of the
i7), so I moved over to Linux on the desktop. It has grown up quite a
bit and is now very usable IMO.
But Linux on PCs is not the end-all, be-all of computing, and
portability testing on other platforms can even force out latent bugs on
the "native" platform.
I can provide access to fairly recent UltraSPARC hardware running
Solaris for further work along these lines. I can also do some builds
and such on there myself, if that would be useful. I also have several
other platforms as well. Contact me if you're interested in exploring some.
For my own use, though, while I'm following pcb-rnd development with
interest, the loss of transparency was a show-stopper for me. I realize
you don't want to deal with OpenGL (which is definitely the best way to
do this), but isn't there a practical way to implement transparency
without it?
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
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