KiCad

failed installation

Asked by Peter Stein

I followed the instructions as best I could from the web site http://www.kicad-pcb.org/display/KICAD/Download page, and at first it took over 4 hours to download files to computer with several files having to be attempted multiple times, I went to bed and left the PC going, in the morning the install script reported that several files were not downloaded and suggested to re run the install update process, I did that, and it ran to completion with no error messages I could see in the terminal window. I then went looking were the Kicad application was on my program list and could not find it by manually looking for it and not by searching either (using KiCad as search term). I read through the install script to see if there was a clear instruction for a directory that an executable would be put, but all references I could find to directories were empty or did not exist as expected.

Where would Kicad be? How would I find it or to verify that anything was installed?
When I installed an old version (on another computer running Zorin 8) from the software centre - all worked OK and now I would like to install the latest version on my computer to do some real work, I tried the suggested install method, and although very little made sense to me - I persisted until the confirmations in Terminal gave me confidence that I had done the right thing - now I wonder if not being in the right directory or perhaps making some preliminary steps allow the script to just not do anything?

A newby
Mint 15

Thanks for reading

Peter

Question information

Language:
English Edit question
Status:
Solved
For:
KiCad Edit question
Assignee:
No assignee Edit question
Solved by:
Maciej Suminski
Solved:
Last query:
Last reply:
Revision history for this message
Best Maciej Suminski (orsonmmz) said : 		#1

Hi Peter,

The basic check to find out if KiCad is installed is to type 'kicad' to a terminal. If it runs - you made it, otherwise - please check your home directory/kicad_sources/kicad.bzr/build. There you should find files such as pcbnew/pcbnew, kicad/kicad, eeschema/eeschema and so on. If they do not exist, then it means that the compilation has failed. In such case, please go to the build folder (~/kicad_sources/kicad.bzr/build), run 'make' and send here the output.

Regards,
Orson

Revision history for this message
Peter Stein (mekuranda) said : 		#2

Thanks for the advice Orson.
I checked and no directories called kicad_sources exist in my home directory - so I will assume that I did something wrong and it was put somewhere else - not sure how I can find it (but will do some looking shortly) in the meantime I loaded Kicad from the unbuntu repository and it seems to work however it is a 2012 year build - if there are no significant differences to current I will consider using this (note I asked a separate question to find a update log and this was answered).

Considering that this software is not likely to be upgraded and put up on simpler installation repositories, I looked at DipTrace, and hope I can get this to work on Linux, and see there is so much more help and support for us newbies (I am a long time PCB Cad user and previous distributor for Australia for a no. of packages so I am a newbie as regards Linux CAD only).

As a suggestion, it would be a lot friendlier to users to provide a line in the sand every 6 months or so and upload a stable version to the various repositories so people like us (who just want things to work with minimum of fuss) can check for upgrades - I don't expect your dedicated team to make Linux upgrade scripts or processes directly as it appears that variations in Distro's makes this a hard unfulfilling prospect.

Cheers

Peter
Australia