This guide describes one way to build gEDA/gaf (gschem and friends) on the Windows operating system. It uses Cygwin as the layer between Windows and the *nix world (ie gcc, make, bash etc…).

1. Download and run setup.exe from cygwin website: http://www.cygwin.com.

In the package selection dialog, select the following packages:

(Hint: press the “view” button once to arrange the list in alphabetical order)

atk-devel
crypt
file
gcc
gtk2-x11-devel
guile-devel
libgmp-devel
libtool1.5
make
pango-devel
patchutils
pcre-devel
pcre-doc
pkg-config
xorg-x11-devel
xorg-x11-fscl
xterm

2. Append these lines to your .bash_profile:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/geda/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export PATH=$HOME/geda/bin:$PATH
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$HOME/geda/lib/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH

Update your environment:

$ source .bash_profile

3. Go to the gEDA sources download page.

From the gEDA/gaf group, download only the packages which have a date as its version. The necessary dependencies were already installed in step 1. However, if you haven't installed or built the libstroke package, be sure to add

--disable-stroke

to the opts= line. Add the following options to the opts= line in the Makefile

--disable-update-mime-database --disable-update-desktop-database --disable-nls

4. Go to the download directory and type:

$ make open
$ make install
( ...patience... )

5. Now, to properly view the documentation from the help menu of gschem:

Locate the executables of your browser and PDF reader and create links from /usr/bin. Examples:

$ ln -s "c:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" /usr/bin/iexplore
$ ln -s "c:\Program Files\Firefox\firefox.exe" /usr/bin/firefox
$ ln -s "c:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Reader\AcroRd32.exe" /usr/bin/acroread

Try:

$ iexplore
( Microsoft Internet Explorer appears )
$ firefox
( Firefox appears - if installed )
$ acroread
( Adobe Acrobat Reader appears )
$ gschemdoc -m
( gEDA documentation appears )

6. Finally, start the X server:

$ startx

Have fun!