Building KiCAD on Linux Mint 12 (Lisa)

[djsb]

Hi,
Just thought I'd post an initial link to my experiences of compiling KiCAD on Linux Mint (Lisa) this afternoon.

Please read the comments (when moderated-at the bottom-still not moderated,probably lost) here

http://www.wayneandlayne.com/blog/2010/12/03/how-to-build-kicad-on-ubuntu/

where I detail the error messages and what I did to get round them.

I will collect the information here later on.

Please have a go yourself so that we can iron out any problems together.

Thanks.

David.

P.S If you can't be bothered with compiling code here is a link with nightly builds (for now).

http://kicad.picaxe.cz/
 

Better to learn how to compile the code for yourself though.

[djsb]

As promised

1/ First download the source code:

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sudo apt-get install bzr
bzr checkout lp:kicad kicad.bzr

2/ Next download the build tools

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sudo apt-get install build-essential checkinstall cmake doxygen zlib1g-dev

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sudo apt-get install debhelper dpatch libx11-dev libglu1-mesa-dev libgl1-mesa-dev messa-common-dev libwxbase2.8-dev libwxgtk2.8-dev libboost-dev fakeroot subversion libboost-serialization-dev

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sudo apt-get build-dep kicad
3/ Once the source code has downloaded and all the build tools are installed, go into the new source code directory:

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cd kicad.bzr
4/ To keep things cleaner, it's suggested that you create a build directory for the build files:

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mkdir kicad-build
cd kicad-build
5/ Kicad uses the CMake tool, so we must run that first:

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cmake -DKICAD_TESTING_VERSION=ON ../
6/ CMake generates standard Makefiles, so we proceed in the usual way:

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make
If you have multiple processor cores in your computer, you can do some of the work in parallel, by adding -j N to your make line. Replace N with the number of cores in your computer. My computer has two cores, so I used this command to more quickly build Kicad:

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make -j 2
7/ Once the build is finished, install the Kicad files:

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sudo make install
Now, you can run kicad and check that everything is working.

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8/ Once a few days or weeks have passed and you want to get back up to date, start by updating your copy of the Kicad source code:

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cd ~/kicad.bzr
bzr update
You probably want to remove all the old build files:

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cd build
rm -rf *
Continue as before, for compiling and installing Kicad:

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cmake -DKICAD_TESTING_VERSION=ON ../
make
sudo make install
We hope this guide was useful and accurate! If you run into any trouble, please leave a comment below and we’ll do our best to help you out.

If you want to also install the Kicad library of parts, you can use these commands:

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bzr checkout lp:~kicad-lib-committers/kicad/library kicad-library.bzr
cd kicad-library.bzr/
mkdir build
cd build/
cmake ../
sudo make install

This method has been derived from the wayneandlayne link above. I have added the commands needed to download missing packages and made one or two corrections. All thats needed now is for someone to write a shell script that can be run easily.

Please try this out for yourself.

David.

[amspire]

David, 

Thanks. I am right now half way through setting up a Ubuntu Electronic Remix (UER) VMWare virtual machine based on Ubuntu 10.10. There is no ISO for UER, so you have to build up a normal Ubuntu workstation, link it to the UER sources, then install any of the UER packages.

The main reason is I would like to take a look at gEDA and it doesn't run well on Windows - it really needs Linux.

I have got used to using the Daily builds for my Windows KiCad, so I will probably want the same newer versions on Ubuntu. All your notes should work as well on Ubuntu as Mint. I am looking forward to comparing Linux KiCad to Windows KiCad.

Richard

[kruegejj]

Thanks for posting this David!

The command sudo apt-get build-dep kicad didn't work for me.  The first error I got was:

E: You must put some 'source' URIs in your sources.list

This was solved by making sure that the Update Manager -> Edit -> Software Sources -> LinuxMint Software -> Source Code box was checked.  After that, the error I got was:

E: Unable to find a source package for kicad.

However, none of this really mattered because the list of apt-get packages you gave above was thorough enough that kicad built without complaint.