Hi, folks. Brand new here, hope this is the right forum.
I just did a fresh FreeBSD install on amd64 and all looks well. But when I installed the KiCad package I got the “quarterly” 5.1.12 rather than the “latest” 6.0.2 for that architecture. How do I make it get v6?
Thanks much.
Contact the packager for FreeBSD.
There are a bunch of names there, so it’s not entirely clear to me who the right person is.
But I’ll take a SWAG at it.
thx.mch.
This was the 3rd or 4th hit on a search: FreshPorts -- cad/kicad: Schematic and PCB editing software It’s not quarterly but seems to be where releases are first announced.
Probably you want to watch the page to wait until 6.0.4, or use 6.0.2 until then.
Yes, I found that and dropped cmt a note. But I don’t know how to direct pkg to anything but the (apparently default) 5.1.12 , otherwise I’d be happy to try 6.0.2 .
Not a FreeBSD user, just used some search-fu.
I get it. I’ve seen all those pages. What I want to do is install via pkg, not build from source.
Sorry, not a FreeBSD user either, so really can’t help.
At the bottom of the first page I linked to, it says:
For most ports, a precompiled
packagealso exists, saving the user the work and time of having to compile anything at all. Usepkg installto securely download and install the precompiled version of a port. For more information see Using pkg for Binary Package Management
which takes you to the second page, where it says:
… the
Latestbranch provides the latest versions of the packages to the users.To switch from quarterly to latest run the following commands:
# mkdir -p /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos # cp /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.confEdit the file /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf and change the string quarterly to latest in the
url:line.
Good luck.
Ah, I get it now. What I didn’t grok is that this (the quarterly/latest branch scheme) is a FreeBSD thing and not (just) a KiCad thing. I’ll give that a go.
Thanks for your persistence and patience.
It’s been awhile since I tried BSD. My take is that it’s a distro that you’d better be willing to roll up your sleeves and get dirty in code if you want to use it. It competed with Linux for the same users and didn’t fare as well. As such it never really reached that critical mass of user base needed to make it a robust alternative.
Running BSD was just taking on another project for me. I wanted something to help me with other projects. To each their own. We all choose our own rabbit holes. Not trying to start OS WW3 here. Just some advice in case you are shopping OS’s here.
Thanks for the warning; that’s mos def not the case with me - I’m Hardwareman and not the slightest bit inclined to hack CAD code. I’m sorta shopping OSen - I’m in the market for a change of CAD and kicad6 comes highly recommended by a trusted friend. The “problem” is that I have a reasonable level of experience+comfort with xBSD and just haven’t found penguix to my liking, largely because there are just too damn flavours of them. So at the moment I just want to give kicad a shot under FreeBSD, and if the port turns out to be too immature/unstable/whatever, perhaps switch (under protest) to penguix.
Just taking it by ear at the moment.
You may find that the KiCAD is simply outdated because of lack of developer hours at BSD. Part of the rolling up of sleeves might be to learn to compile and package it yourself. You could then contribute that back. The people that have been doing it would probably be happy to give you some help on that front.
KiCad seems to be up to date in the latest branch of FreeBSD. Since 6 was released at the turn of the year, it would have made it to the quarterly release within a month of so from now.
Once the work of developing build scripts has been done for a software suite, it’s fairly easy to push out a new release. Only when tools and libraries change with a new version do the scripts have to be rechecked.
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