Fedora Electronic Laboratory
The next version of Red Hat’s Fedora Linux will offer a feature called Fedora Electronic Laboratory that should be of interest to robotics and electronics hobbyists. Fedora Electronic Lab will include free software for ASIC and VLSI design, verilog and VHDL hardware design, SPICE simulation, PCB layout, schematic capture, timing and waveform visualization, 3D layout visualization, and microcontroller programming tools including Atmel AVR and PIC tools. Many of the free software tools were already available but required compilation or complex installation to use. Now they’ll be available to all Fedora Linux users without any extra work. A LiveCD version will also be available. Over 250 Universities are know to already use the VLSI tools in this collection, so having a complete Linux distro with the tools included should be a big time saver. Fedora Electronic Lab is largely the result of efforts by Chitlesh Goorah to collect useful existing free software for electronic engineers.