New to Kicad. Just installed Ubuntu 21.04, and installed the latest Kicad V5.1.10 from Kicad repositories, following the instructions provided.
Just finished routing my board, wanted to see what it looks like in the 3D viewer… but it displays garbage. See picture attached as an example…
3D viewer used to work fine before I upgraded Ubuntu and Kicad alogn with it.
Was using Ubuntu 16.04 and Kicad 4.0.4 IIRC.
I have already had a problem with the footprint libraries that failed to load because V4 left some config file in a hidden folder in my user / home partition. That was solved by deleting tghe old footprint config file.
So maybe the 3D viewer now fails again because of some conflict again with V4 config files still hanging around ? Just thought I would mention it…
I thought maybe it’s video driver problem, but not so sure because when PCBNew starts up, it says that 3D rendering failed to activate, so I guess I am using software rendering, which would consistent with how slow the 3D viewer refreshed the screen… like2 seconds per frame or something.
Anyway… if someone in the know cold help me out, I would be soooo very grateful !
Regards,
Vince
EDIT : huuuu… how does one proceed to attach pictures or files to a post ? Can’t find anything to do that… am I blind ??
Attaching pictures : as I am typing this, I now see a toolbar with your traditional buttons including “upload” button… I swear this toolbar did not show up when I posted my initial message… maybe my computer is playing tricks on me… or I am losing it I don’t know…
Here is a picture at last.
From what I see, I would say it looks like the board itself, is there : there is a flat rectangle whose aspect ratio matches that of my board. So that is good.
However you get straight lines shooting up the sky so to speak, emanating from some parts of the board. So maybe these, probably, correspond to the components on the board. Either the 3D models are buggy, which I doubt since everybody is using them… or Kicad is not rendering them properly, at least not the ‘Z’ part of the model. I fails to render the thickness/height of the 3D model, something like that ?
Did a couple experiments to try and narrow it down :
Potential V4 config file conflict : in order to rule that out , I created a new user account, so that Ubuntu creates a 100% virgin home directory.
Result : no change, problem still there, no better no worse.
Potential 3D acceleration problem : I noticed one can easily switch, on the fly/real time, between 3D acceleration and S/W rendering, just by going to the “Preferences” Menu and selecting either "ModernToolset (Accelerated) " or “Modern Tollset (Fallback)”.
So tried that : either option yield the same garbage. However I am not sure that’s conclusive because in both case the frame rate is equally incredibly slow : several seconds to compute one frame, even though the status bar at the bottom pretends to achieve 1 or 1,5 FPS, it’s not what I witness in practice.
So maybe that means 3D accel does not even work on my computer so all I am seeing is S/W rendering in both cases ? Probably that…
so I don’t know. Maybe the next thing I could try is figure out, for certain, whether 3D rendering works at all on my machine. Maybe it doesn’t since it’s a fresh Ubuntu install. Maybe I have again, as always, problems with video drivers (Nvidia…). So might investigate that.
Still, S/W rendering ought to work in any case, which it does not…
OK chances are high that it’s video driver problem : since switching to Ubuntu 21.04 (from 16.04), the entire desktop sucks big time, slow as a dog… am using an Nvidia card so I immediately suspected that the new install forced this “nouveau” free driver on me, bingo.
This drivers never cut it from day one 10/15 years ago, apparently still does not today.
Always had much better luck with the proprietary Nvidia driver… unfortunately from what I gathered on Google, their latest driver does not support my old card (Geforce 6200). Probably why the Ubuntu tool that manages the proprietary drivers… does NOT offer me to install the Nvidia driver… bummer.
So that means I must buy a new(er) graphics card just so I can install the Nvidia driver.
… but first need to ask around to see what card is old enough to be compatible with my computer (needs to be PCI slot) yet still properly supported by the current driver.
Or maybe I can install an older version of the driver, don’t know if that’s possible/recommended…
Anyway, going to sort out this driver problem first, then report back…
No wonder you experience sluggishness running modern desktop on a 17 year old graphics card…
Do yourself a favor, get a mini pc or something for 200-300 usd, it will run circles around your old hardware.
Sorry, my last comment must have been ambiguous : I don’t have a problem with my computer, it runs Linux and Kicad just fine. It’s only been brought down to a crawl because of that crappy ‘nouveau’ graphics card driver, that is all. S/W problem not H/W problem…
When you use a 17 year old hardware from a company that doesn’t cooperate with open source community which is why open source drivers are shit, it’s a bit of a hardware problem.
It was a pain to install and use KiCad from the official repositories due to incorrect build configuration. So I highly recommend to use official KiCad PPA, if it’s not done already.
Yep I have already done that, as stated in the very first sentence of my original message !
Anyway, problem “solved”… Ubuntu 21.04 as a whole was complete disaster so I just reverted back to my previous Ubuntu install, 16.04. 5 years old maybe, but at least it works just fine, unlike 21.04. So I tried installing Kicad 5.1.10 from the Kicad repositories… on 16.04, fully expecting to run into problems, incompatible dependency versions or what not, at the very least but… turned out it installed without a itch and runs perfectly !
So in the end I never needed to upgrade to Ubuntu 21.04, it was not necessary ! But the Kicad download page said it was for " 21.04 " so I took that as “works ONLY on 21.04”… which is not true at all. Might be worth putting a mention of that on the download page, to save people from going through the same misery as I have with Ubuntu 21.04…
Wel it’s supposed not to be supported but in practive I still get updates for it very regularly… weird.
As for not having 5,99… well 16.04 it didn’t have 5.1.10 either, had to install it. So will install V6 just the same when it comes out… and if it really can’t work on 16.04 no worries, I would just run it inside a virtual machine running whatever Ubuntu version is required for it to work but… I will not give up 16.04 as my main/host OS. 21.04 was just a complete shit show :-/ Until it’s fixed, I will stick to 16.04. Lack of updates don’t care… it’s not like I was running Windows and needed to upgrade every morning the anti-virus to stay alive…
Have not tried it. 16.04 works fine, no benefit in trying a newer version… I mean I get your point, updates… I don’t care about updates, as I just said I would care if I was running Windows so as not to get some virus or something, but on Linux, in 20 years never updating, never had a problem…
Would update only if if had a severe bug that really needed fixing, and that I knew a fix was under way, then waiting for it to be released and jumping on it as soon as it’s available but… if really there was such a massive bug well… I simply would not have installed that version of the OS to begin with !
