February 14, 2023

KiCAD 7 on Fedora

I am running Fedora 37 and getting kicad from the Fedora packages.
Currently this gives me KiCAD 6.0 and it simply crashes and is useless.

KiCAD 7 has just been announced. I downloaded the tarball "for packagers" and am going to see just how hard it is to build from source.

Build it!

tar xf kicad-7.0.0.tar.bz2
cd kicad-7.0.0
There is no Makefile in the top level directory or anything simple like that. There are dependencies on just about everything known to man. Python and Wx are among them. The build mechanism is Cmake. 
mkdir -p build/release
mkdir -p build/debug
cd build/release
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo ../../
I tells me the GLEW library is missing. So, the game is to use dnf to install missing things, then rinse, lather, repeat. 
su
dnf install glew glew-devel
dnf install glm-devel
dnf install libcurl-devel
dnf install boost-devel
dnf install libngspice-devel
dnf install opencascade-devel
dnf install wxBase3-devel
Some of these (notably opencascade) pull in many other packages. Opencascade pulls in qt5 and tcl as well as java!

The wxWidgets lead to confusion. Fedora has a myriad of wx packages. I tried wxBase3, but that did not cut it. I already had wxBase installed. So I try wxGTK-devel, and this installed version 3.2.1 but this did not make the build happy. So, I tried wxGTK3, and this installed version 3.0.5. The build seems to find this, but complains as follows: 

Could NOT find wxWidgets: Found unsuitable version "3.0.5", but required is at least "3.2.1"
So that is as far as I am going to go with KiCAD 7 -- I'll let the Fedora crew get busy and bump to the next version of vxWidgets.

What are all these wx packages?

The above indicates that wxGTK in some form is the default for all linux platforms. I find it curious that I have been using wxPython for some time without installing any special packages, but probably this was all taken care of for me when I installed wxPython and I never noticed. Besides I wasn't trying to build wxPython from source.

Get KiCAD 7 from copr

Copr is "cool other package repo" and I am told that although KiCAD 7 cannot be provided in the regular packages for Fedora 37, I can get it from "copr". So, I follow the recipe: 
su
dnf install dnf-plugins-core (I already had this)
dnf erase kicad
dnf copr enable @kicad/kicad
dnf install kicad
This does not work.

Install and try KiCAD 7 on Windows

I download kicad-7.0.0-x86_64.exe (1.1G), copy it to "tom" on my Windows 10 machine and click on it to run it. It will take 6.2G and go to C:/Program Files/Kicad/7.0. The install takes a long time (maybe 5 minutes). Once the smoke clears I have an icon to start it and it seems to start up just fine.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Electronics pages / [email protected]