The open source project gEDA is coming along nicely and is already quite viable on some platforms. Other commercial layout packages can easily reach into the tens of thousands of dollars. Yes, Eagle is very popular, and available on multiple platforms but it is not free. Why bother? Because I want to be able to design PCBs with free, accessible, tools.
Some earlier documentation of this setup exists, but this installation is not all things sweet and light, so I thought I should put my two cents in. These systems are effectively package managers, much like those found in various linux distributions, which can– in principle– automatically install all of the software parts that are required to install a major application. I use both fink and darwinports (which is renaming itself macports ) to install unix software on my Mac, although I’ve come to prefer fink. These (loosely, if at all, organized) notes should be helpful to anyone that wants to get started making PCBs using a mac, linux, or other unix-like system. I recently learned to use some of these tools in the gEDA suite to lay out printed circuit boards.
#Xcircuit mac draw resistors mac os x
The situation has somewhat improved in the past few years because the X11 layer in Mac OS X allows graphical unix applications to run natively on the Mac, concurrently with other programs. There has historically been, and still is, a lack of good, free MacOS native EDA (electronic design automation) software.