Hello there,

This email is cross-posted on: - fedora electronic lab mailing list - fedora epel mailing list - centos devel mailing list - fedora marketing mailing list

It describes briefly what FEL and EPEL (if case you don't know) are and my intentions for this deployment.

FEL stands for Fedora Electronic Laboratory. The later is about packaging, maintaining and shipping electronic simulation packages for real hardware development. It was initially started with my passion for ASIC design, but now covers various design tools for: * Digital Simulation * VLSI Layout and Verification * RTL and logic synthesis design flows * Circuit Simulation * PCB Layout and Circuit Design * Micro Controller (µC) Programming and Embedded Systems Development

http://chitlesh.fedorapeople.org/FEL/

Now we are about roughly 8 contributors.

It is already more than 2 years since the early bits of FEL were introduced to Fedora repositories. Many other Fedora packagers and Fedora-Arm SIG have contributed a lot this success as well.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM

Packaging is good, but is not enough. One of the main goals is to act as CAD/EDA engineers and bring open source hardware design tools to a meaningful usage and ensure interoperability within the design flows. We are thriving for interoperability, because without this, design tools are useless and even if its open source. Most of these packages have not yet been packaged for any other distributions.

More specific details on the blog posts. http://clunixchit.blogspot.com/

Building a community and do marketing around FEL is also another of our priorities and a _hard_ task. Knowledge in electronics is advised and recommended :)

I have received a lot of suggestions to deploy FEL on EPEL repositories so that Centos and RHEL users can use them on a longer basis. As many universities around the world have deployed enterprise-class Linux distributions such as Centos and RHEL, I believe users, lecturers and designers can largely benefit from the EPEL repositories.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL http://www.centos.org/

I have no idea whether Scientific Linux can take advantage of these intentions or not. If you do, let me know.

In the past and even till now, I had very good experiences with Centos contributors. With some of the Centos contributors, we (fedora) even shared booths and devrooms in Belgium and Germany. If ever a Centos packager is already packaging any electronic simulation packages, please send us a mail in our brand new mailing list. We looking forward to hear from you. We'll be glad if we can work together. I'm focussing on EPEL 5.

As I'm writing, only %1 of the work for building FEL packages for EPEL repositories has been done. Thus during the Fedora 11 development cycle, most of the work will be carried out and dependencies solve, at least mine.

https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/users/packages/chitlesh

Nevertheless, some new tools will find their way to FEL very soon, e.g: verilator. The packages that I or any FEL contributor will push to EPEL repositories will not be as cutting-edge as they will on supported Fedora repositories.

In the upcoming months, which I'm waiting for which desperately, we will see more mixed-level simulation support on the FEL platform.

Now, FEL 10 will be out soon at the end of this month as a LiveDVD and packages are yum-able from fedora's repositories.

Your suggestions and critics are welcome. We are only a small group of contributors who are working on a very specific application, "hardware design tools" and making their upstream benefit from the open source eco system. FEL has a lot of success since its official F8 release, and we are keen to keep that going and extend our umbrella.

thanks and kind regards, Chitlesh GOORAH