Cannot open default symbols table

Schematic
1

Hello everybody,

I haven’t seen the question before, if I missed it I am sorry.

Installed kicad the first time and I got following error when trying to select an symbols table:

Error reading symbol library table '/usr/share/kicad/template/kicad.kicad_pro'. Expecting '(' in '/usr/share/kicad/template/kicad.kicad_pro', line 1, offset 1.

The file looks like a normal json, nothing weird or corrupted. It seems to me like it was created with the install of the programm.

Installed under ArchLinux from the extra repository.

2

What version/OS are you running. Paste the version from Help / About KiCad

3

As I said OS is Archlinux. There is no OS versioning, its rolling release.

KiCad:

Application: KiCad x86_64 on x86_64

Version: 7.0.10, release build

Libraries:
	wxWidgets 3.2.4
	FreeType 2.13.2
	HarfBuzz 8.3.0
	FontConfig 2.15.0
	libcurl/8.5.0 OpenSSL/3.2.0 zlib/1.3 brotli/1.1.0 zstd/1.5.5 libidn2/2.3.4 libpsl/0.21.2 (+libidn2/2.3.4) libssh2/1.11.0 nghttp2/1.58.0

Platform: Manjaro Linux, 64 bit, Little endian, wxGTK, i3, x11

Build Info:
	Date: Dec 30 2023 03:23:58
	wxWidgets: 3.2.4 (wchar_t,wx containers) GTK+ 3.24
	Boost: 1.83.0
	OCC: 7.7.2
	Curl: 8.5.0
	ngspice: 41
	Compiler: GCC 13.2.1 with C++ ABI 1018

Build settings:
	KICAD_USE_EGL=ON
	KICAD_SPICE=ON
4

This file: /usr/share/kicad/template/kicad.kicad_pro is not a “symbol library table”, but a project file (template).

So now the question is: Why does KiCad attempt to open a project file and interpret it as a symbol library table (which has the name sym-lib-table and an S-expression format).

5

Ah, thanks. That explains a lot.

For me the followup questions are:

  • Where should the symbol library table be stored in the filesystem? and
  • if there is none stored, how/where do i get a standard/default one?
6

The symbols will be under /usr/share/kicad/symbols

Likewise the footprints will be under /usr/share/kicad/footprints

They should be installed by default but depending on how you installed the package they may/may not be there.

7

But that was not the question. The question was for the symbol library table.

There is a sym-lib-table file in Kicad’s configuration directory. On Linux that would be ~/.config/kicad/7.0/sym-lib-table and this file lists the global symbol libraries. You can delete or rename the whole configuration directory. If you then start KiCad afterwards, KiCad assumes it is started for the first time and re-creates a default configuration (So if you renamed this directory, you can use a source code merge program such as for example meldmerge to to look for (and merge) changes in the configuration.

Apart from that, each project can have it’s own sym-lib-table (and fp-lib-table) files for project specific libraries.

8

I need to learn to read :slight_smile:

9

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