Quick schematic in gschem running on OS X.

Quick schematic in gschem running on OS X.

In an attempt to find a free set of schematic and PCB tools for hobby work, I looked back at gEDA. The last time I used it was when the project first started, years and years ago. I was happy to see that OS X had a set of fink packages for the gEDA suite. After figuring out how to get X11 in Leopard (since I didn’t include it when I installed 10.5) and install fink, getting gEDA going was a snap.  The user jluciani in the Arduino forums has provided some free pcb footprints he has used from previous projects.

Couple of issues:

  1. fink must be installed as admin / root.
  2. Xquartz is a OS X implementation of X.org.
  3. The binary packages for gEDA did not seem to install correctly.