This article reports you a collection of Fedora's Electronic Engineering software. They are tools you can use to create electronic circuits, schematics, drawings, and simulations as well as to produce the Printed Circuit Boards -- and the good news is they are all Free Software. We see here same set of applications, such as Kicad and NGSpice, as well as the ones only Fedora had currently, like KTechLab and Qucs, compared to the electronics sets of Debian and Ubuntu. Finally, I write this article as a tribute to Fedora Electronic Lab (FEL) -- the special OS for electronic engineering that was dismissed years ago and is planned to be released along with Fedora 34 -- as I want this distro to be available once again.

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Install Electronic Engineering Apps on Fedora

$ sudo dnf groupinstall 'Electronic Lab'

The 'Electronic Lab' is the keyword to install the electronic engineering applications on Fedora. Comparatively, it is equal to 'science-electronics' on Debian and 'electronics-all' on Ubuntu -- when you install it you got all the electronic tools. I did this on Fedora Workstation 33 and it gave me download by 1GB, 900 software packages, and 4GB disk space to use. Click here to see the full list of packages.

Common Applications

Below is list of Fedora electronic engineering applications which are commonly available on Debian (see here) and Ubuntu (see here) as well.

• Arduino
• AVR Dude
• Electric
• Fritzing
• KiCAD
• Geda
• Octave
• GNU Radio
• NGSpice
• TkGate

Arduino

"The open-source Arduino Software (IDE) makes it easy to write code and upload it to the board". You need this to drive your Arduinos, the microcontroller based educational creativity devices. [WEBSITE] 

AVR Dude

"AVRDUDE is a utility to download/upload/manipulate the ROM and EEPROM contents of AVR microcontrollers using the in-system programming technique (ISP)." [WEBSITE]

Electric

"Electric is a sophisticated electrical CAD system for the design of integrated circuits. It can handle many forms of design [...] " [WEBSITE] [WEBSITE2]

Fritzing

The awesome electronic drawing for breadboard, schematics, and PCBs without simulations. [WEBSITE]

KiCAD

"Schematic capture, PCB layout, 3D viewer, and simulation". Your complete electronic studio of GNU/Linux platform. [WEBSITE]

GEDA

"[...] the gEDA project offers a mature suite of free software applications for electronics design, including schematic capture, attribute management, bill of materials (BOM) generation, netlisting into over 20 netlist formats, analog and digital simulation, and printed circuit board (PCB) layout." It is available on Fedora when it's no longer available anymore on latest Ubuntu. [WEBSITE]

Octave

"Scientific Programming Language [...] largely compatible with Matlab." [WEBSITE]

GNU Radio

"[...] a powerful framework for developing streaming, real-time signal processing applications for Software Defined Radio (SDR) on general purpose processors. " [WEBSITE]

NGSpice

The best circuit simulator which can work with KiCAD, Geda, and other programs. [WEBSITE]

TkGate

"TkGate is a event driven digital circuit simulator with a tcl/tk-based graphical editor. TkGate supports a wide range of primitive circuit elements as well as user-defined modules for hierarchical design." This is the alternative to either Geda, KiCAD, or Qucs to draw and simulate circuits -- it is simple and fast. [WEBSITE] [WEBSITE2] [WEBSITE3]

More Applications

Below is list of Fedora electronic engineering applications which are only found on Fedora (version 33). Some of them are difficult to obtain with Debian or Ubuntu OS but fortunately available on Fedora.

• Alliance CAD System
• Dia
• Julia
• KTechLab
• Icaro
• Linsmith
• Qucs
• DrRacket
• GNU PIC Simulator
• SmartSim

Alliance CAD System

"Alliance is a complete set of free cad tools and portable libraries for vlsi design. It includes a vhdl compiler and simulator, logic synthesis tools, and automatic place and route tools." [WEBSITE]  

Dia

GNOME Dia is a diagram drawing software with electronic schematic drawing ability. Not included on Ubuntu 'electronic-all'. [WEBSITE]

Julia

The programming language for numerical analysis & technical computing which is a backend of Cantor which is also included with Fedora 'Electronic Lab' . [WEBSITE]

KTechLab

"KTechlab is an IDE for microcontrollers and electronics. " This is the graphical simulator app which had not been available on Debian & Ubuntu for years. [WEBSITE] 

Icaro

"An educational robotic software aimed to develop robotic and programming fundamentals. " [WEBSITE1][WEBSITE2]

"linSmith is a Smith Charting program, mainly designed for educational use. As such, there is an emphasis on capabilities that improve the 'showing the effect of'-style of operation." This is a software to learn impedance of anntenna in radio frequency study.[WEBSITE] 

Qucs

"Qucs is an integrated circuit simulator which means you are able to setup a circuit with a graphical user interface (GUI) and simulate the large-signal, small-signal and noise behaviour of the circuit" [WEBSITE] 

GNU PIC Simulator

"gpsim is an open sourced simulator for Microchip's PIC microcontrollers. It supports all three families of PICs: 12-bit, 14-bit, and 16-bit cores." [WEBSITE] [WEBSITE2]

Not Included

• LibrePCB
• Lepton EDA

LibrePCB, the KiCAD alternative, is a considerably new software so it doesn't available either on Ubuntu or Debian. Lepton EDA, the continuation of GEDA, is already available on Debian right now and on Ubuntu too. It is very good if these two included in Fedora in the later releases.