I have been trying get Kicad running on my CentOS 7 system and I am having some trouble. The only route that seems possible is installing the package in the EPEL repository but the version there only goes up to version 4 of Kicad and I really don’t want to have to go back to that if I don’t have to.
I then had a go at building from source but it just doesn’t seem possible without a huge amount of work as every version of a package that is required seems to be the wrong one. (Currently stuck as I cannot build and install the right version of wxPython to get past a cmake commad).
Really I was just wondering if anyone out there has had any success building for CentOS 7? I did find a previous thread discussing this but the instructions did not work and it was for the previous version of CentOS: KiCad for RHEL / CentOS?
I sympathise with you as RHEL/CentOS favours stability over latest software versions. What about Fedora? Is it close enough to RHEL to install without too many dependencies? (I don’t know, I don’t run Fedora, I only manage some CentOS machines, with no Kicad users there.)
Fedora is one of the few officially supported linux distros of the kicad project. The others are ubuntu, debian and arch. A few others have unofficial support where you might be lucky and find a package but they generally suffer from platform dependent bugs that will most likely not be addressed by the core team.
You could also give a try to the Appimages from @KarlZeilhofer and @probono, the latest I found is v5. 1.4, but I’m sure the newest one is lurking somewhere
@der.ule the app image does not work as it just complains about the wrong version of glibc. From my understanding that is a basically a showstopper as the glibc version shipped with the OS is the one you get and means I would need to compile my own version to make the app image work.
@kenyapcomau I had looked into trying to run the fedora version as it is maintained, but from what I understand it is a big no no to run packages built for another system. There may be a way to use them but from what I can see it would require trying to rebuild the package, and seemingly the further away the fedora version is from CentOS the more difficult it gets.
Red Hat is designed to be a rock solid, stable OS for servers. I suppose secure desktop might be a distant second but I haven’t kept up with it after leaving the place I was a system admin for. After starting with RH 5.2(?) I quickly moved to Mandrake because, at that time, hardware was evolving way too fast for it to be a usable desktop machine. When Mandrake went bust I went to Debian because I was looking for stability. Even that can be painful at times because of its slower adoption policy. I started having to roll my own Kicad when I started using it.
At the place I maintain machines for, it’s used for servers, but mostly for desktops running CAD software because RHEL is one of the supported platforms. This is understandable but a bit annoying as some newer software can’t be installed. For example a whole bunch of software based on GTK3 (including Chrome) won’t run on CentOS 6 (yes, it’s out of support, but the OS can’t be upgraded while the old CAD software requires it).
I believe that CentOS comes with FlatPak support pre-installed. Give the FlatPak version of KiCad a try and see if that works. (the RedHat/CentOS ecosystem usually has better FlatPak support than AppImage support, since RedHat is the main developer of FlatPak).
@imcinerney thanks for the flatpak suggestion. It seems to be all up and running. Feel a bit silly now having tried so long to get it built from source. Thanks to everyone else for the suggestions and help.
As a caution to anyone who also tries the FlatPak version, from what I can tell the build which is currently available does not support scripting so action plugins and the like will not work.
Hi,
just info I just successfully build KiCAD on CentOS 8, it is bit tricky to do, but finally work.
I will try to reproduce all steps in post , so you may try to do same on Centos 7 , or you may wait little bit for me to do that and post step
