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Message-ID: <548215CC.6040909@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2014 15:30:04 -0500
From: Brian Eldridge <briane70 AT gmail DOT com>
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To: geda-help AT delorie DOT com
Subject: [geda-help] Questions from a noob ...
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Reply-To: geda-help AT delorie DOT com

Apologies, resending in plaintext:

====

I am an experienced hardware designer who has not worked with gEDA before.
I stumbled upon it recently and am very interested to try it out, 
however things
are not working seamlessly for me and I'm curious if I can get answers here:

1) Running under Ubuntu Linux 14.04, I installed the latest version 
available
there via apt-get install geda. This appears to be version 1.8.2.20130925.
Should this be good enough, or should I try with the more involved "compile
from git repository approach" to get the very latest?

2) Using the above version, and trying to invoke with "gschem <filename>"
where filename does NOT exist, the tool crashes. Am I doing something 
wrong?
I expected it to create the page, but nothing works unless the page already
exists. Which is annoying for a new design. "gschem" with no arguments
creates "untitled.sch" correctly but I'd prefer to be able to specify 
the file
name as advertised.

3) Alternatively, if I create the page manually and then invoke gschem, 
it does
work - but is there a way to disable the annoying status message popup that
has to be dismissed every time? Also, is there a way to specify the window
size? Not much documentation on the -p option if that's it. Haven't 
found it yet.

4) Finally, if I have multiple pages creates test_1.sch, test_2.sch, if 
I run
"gshem test_1.sch" it bring up page one correctly, but does NOT allow
me to simply page into page 2 the way I would expect.  It does not appear
to recognize any linkage between the pages unless I invoke the tool as
"gshem test_1.sch test_2.sch" listing all pages on the command line.

Essentially this "latest" Ubuntu release does not behave as advertized in
the tutorials at all as per the above - perhaps I am doing something wrong
or should bite the bullet on the lengthier install process?

I'm sure I'll have a lot more questions as I dig in but first I'll see 
what the
answer response time is like on the site.

Thanks in advance!
Brian Eldridge - eager new test driver....