[sdiy] Eagle CAD *beta* for Mac OS X

[Paul Higgins]

Well, if you want to get technical about it, it's not really for OS X, 
it's for X Windows (X11), running on OS X.  It always bothers me when 
software people do this sort of thing.  X11 is _not_ OS X native, it's 
something you have to install extra.

By the way, Apple decided, in their infinite wisdom (not!), to pull 
their beta version of X11 that ran on 10.2, so you have to buy the new 
10.3--at full price--to be able to run their new X11.  It's also almost 
completely disappeared from the web, though I was able to find a copy 
of X11b3 on some obscure site.  (Shouldn't have deleted my copy in the 
first place).  Unix geeks also have violent rows over who has the best 
X11; some of them I've spoken with really like XDarwin and OroborOSX.  
XFree86 (4.3?) is another X server.

New Mac users and those not familiar with OS X should be aware that X11 
stuff usually is not as trivial to run and work with as OS X apps are.  
Unless the software writer was nice enough to provide a 
double-clickable startup app that you can turn into an alias or Dock 
icon, you're going to have to startup from the command line in xterm or 
whatever.  Also, you have to deal with Unix-style file paths, etc.  
It's not horrible, but it's a little disorienting at first, and I found 
that I needed to have some books on hand to get comfortable with it.

If I sound like I'm complaining, I'm not--it's just that X11 apps are 
_totally_ different than OS X apps.  I might add that over at 
SourceForge, there's the "Fink" project that allows OS X users to 
install Linux stuff using the Debian package manager (.deb).  There's 
even a GUI front-end, called Fink Commander--I found it at the Apple OS 
X site.  That should allow you to run Linux engineering apps on X11, 
though I haven't tried it yet.

-PRH

On Monday, May 3, 2004, at 09:21 AM, Neil Johnson wrote:

> For all enlightened souls:
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Today we have released a first beta version of EAGLE for Mac OS X 
> (X11).
> Please see the announcement in news://news.cadsoft.de/eagle.betatest.
>
> Best regards
> Klaus Schmidinger
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> You can download the files from
>
> 	ftp://ftp.cadsoft.de/pub/betatest/
>
> Best get the full package and the freeware.key file.
>
> Downloading now...
>
> --
> Neil Johnson <http://www.njohnson.co.uk>


Paul Higgins
email: higg0008 at tc.umn.edu