gEDA Schematic

Hey,

I have been trying to open the schematic file for the stepper driver and I seem to be failing hardcore. My Linux experience is relatively low, I have been using it for 6 months or so.

I get the impression I am missing some files or extensions, with my limited experience I don't know how to correct this.

Anyways that said, here is/are the error(s) I get in the status window when I try to open the schematic file, many thanks in advance (The post is too long to post, so I will spread it across a couple posts:

Quote
RRRF
gEDA/gschem version 1.4.3.20081231
gEDA/gschem comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; see COPYING for more details.
This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain
conditions; please see the COPYING file for more details.

Read system-gafrc file [/etc/gEDA/system-gafrc]
Did not find optional ~/.gEDA/gafrc file [/home/overide/.gEDA/gafrc]
Did not find optional local gafrc file [/home/overide/gafrc]
Read system-gschemrc file [/etc/gEDA/system-gschemrc]
Did not find optional ~/.gEDA/gschemrc file [/home/overide/.gEDA/gschemrc]
Did not find optional local gschemrc file [/home/overide/gschemrc]
Read init scm file [/usr/share/gEDA/scheme/gschem.scm]
New file [/home/overide/untitled_1.sch]
Did not find specified gafrc file [/home/overide/Downloads/reprap-mendel-20100105/mendel/electronics/stepper-motor-driver/gafrc]
Error reading picture definition line: Gerber files:
.
** Invalid UTF-8 in log message. See stderr or gschem.log.
Setting embedded to 0
Found an unsupported picture angle [ 7643530 ]

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 02/03/2010 10:24AM by Adam.m.Nelson.

Quote
RRRF
Found an invalid whichend on a pin (reseting to zero): 8571648
Found an invalid color [ ]
Setting color to WHITE

I edited this error message so it wasn't so long and annoying to scroll past.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/03/2010 10:25AM by Adam.m.Nelson.

Looks to me like gEDA's not installed correctly from the initial error messages.

Which distro are you running?

ubuntu 9.10

Did you install it through the application manager or manually?

Through the application manager.

Try the obvious, removal and reinstall. I know it sounds a bit windows, but linux isn't perfect either

That was obvious, yet I hadn't thought of it

Never the less no effect, I did notice that I get a different error if I try to open the file by right clicking and telling it to open with gEDA

Quote
gEDA Status
** Invalid UTF-8 in log message. See stderr or gschem.log.
o_text_draw: assertion `o_current->type == OBJ_TEXT' failed

I tried opening another mendel schmatic and got this error below (it's similar but much shorter then the original error message):

Quote
gEDA Status
Read system-gafrc file [/etc/gEDA/system-gafrc]
Did not find optional ~/.gEDA/gafrc file [/home/overide/.gEDA/gafrc]
Did not find optional local gafrc file [/home/overide/gafrc]
Read system-gschemrc file [/etc/gEDA/system-gschemrc]
Did not find optional ~/.gEDA/gschemrc file [/home/overide/.gEDA/gschemrc]
Did not find optional local gschemrc file [/home/overide/gschemrc]
Read init scm file [/usr/share/gEDA/scheme/gschem.scm]
Loading schematic [/home/overide/Downloads/reprap-mendel-20100105/mendel/electronics/mendel-wiring-diagram.sch]
Did not find specified gafrc file [/home/overide/Downloads/reprap-mendel-20100105/mendel/electronics/gafrc]

Is there a way to install these "optional" files?

I think those "optional" files really are optional. Usually a filename ending in "rc" is a configuration file - i.e. where you put your personal configuration preferences.

Having said that, it DOES seem to be insisting on finding "gafrc". You might try "apt-cache search gafrc" which will search in all software modules that your system knows are available for automatic install. Doesn't show anything up on my debian install, so that'll be a dead end, probably.

Hmm. Google lists a couple interesting pages:
[bugs.gentoo.org]
[osdir.com]

Apparently there's a bug in the libgeda package that causes it to not install gafrc. This is a fairly old bug, but recurances of certain classes up bugs are not uncommon, so that's probably what's going on. You can either upgrade or, possibly, downgrade. It may also be possible to get (manually) a upgraded libgeda package, unpack the .deb file (it's a cpio archive, use cpio to unpack it) and extract just the gafrc file.

Alternately, file a bug report with your upstream provider (the ubuntu folks, in your case) and they should fix it promptly...

If you want to, you may also download, compile and install the source package directly. This is supposed to be a completely automated install, which will look something like:
sudo apt-get source libgeda
apt-get build-deps libgeda
cd libgeda*
./configure
make
sudo make install

This is just off the top of my head though - there's better documentation on building debian packages from source elsewhere on the net. I know I'm probably missing a step in there somewhere - something to do with merging the changes specific to the debian build in... the remainder is left as an exercise for the student...

Since gafrc is probably a text file, it may be included without modification in the libgeda-src package, in which cast you just do something like "apt-get source libgeda" "cp {handwwave}/gafrc /etc/gEDA/system-gafrc"

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I'm building it with Baling Wire

hmmm, thanks a bunch for your help guys, I will try that and go from there.