Explaining Spins

[Chitlesh GOORAH]

I'll try to answer the question "who should use Fedora Electronic Lab
?" in a few paragraphs.

Fedora Electronic Lab are a set of packages intended for electronics!
FOR FEDORA 8, Fedora Electronic Lab targets mainly microelectronics.

On 10/12/07, Máirín Duffy wrote:
> ====== from anonymous:
>
> "What's the relationship between these "Official Spins"? Does the
> "Electronics Lab" not have a desktop? Why would I not just get the
> "Official Desktop Spin" and install the electronics programs I need?
> (I've never found a Linux distro set-of-programs like this that was at
> all useful. Nobody uses all the Electronics programs in Fedora. People
> use one or two, along with desktop apps, and some developer tools, and
> so on.)
>
> "Who's the intended audience for each half of this? Developers?
> Electronics developers with big headphones? My grandparents?

If anyone has installed Fedora 8 from any SPIN he/she can ultimately
installed Fedora Electronic Lab packages afterwards via yum/pirut.

Fedora Electronic Lab packages are listed on :
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/FedoraElectronicLab
http://clunixchit.blogspot.com

This is the beauty of Fedora, that is having ONE BIG RPM repository by
default. Thus facilitating the life of any fedora user.

Surely no one will use ALL the FEL packages at once, because
microelectronics is too vast:
There are at least tools for
* backend engineering
* physical design engineering
* circuit simulation
* .....

One will use simulation tools with respect to at least one of the above fields.

But those using FEL packages will need to have a minimum of knowledge
in microelectronics. So if one's parents or granparents want to use
FEL packages he/she are free to do so but the way they will use them
will depend on their knowledge.

Nevertheless, there are many reasons why FEL is important:
* simplify fedora users life, simple and quick installation of
electronic packages
* many upstream packages were forced to improve or corrected (+
included automated installation)
* simplified the integration of FEL packages in other distributions
* interoperability between packages
* 7 extras standard cells up to a feature size of 0.13µm
* more than 200 MB of spice decks simulated with gnucap/ngspice
* a marketing medium for upstream
* acts as a get-together of electronic engineers to improve FEL
platform/packages under Fedora
.. (the list goes on)...
* is another _real_ use of linux among engineers

chitlesh

-- 
http://clunixchit.blogspot.com