Installing it from here helped me to install Kicad
But It should not be a dependency, I think.
KiCad V6 has been working properly for me for some days now.
I don’t know what happened with the launchpad repository, but apparently it’s been fixed.
I don’t care much about loosing KiCad V5 myself, although if there are lots of forum questions related to KiCad V5 and some Appimage is easily installable, then I may install it just to look up some things to answer forum questions. But it’s not high on my priority list.
I would also be very interested to hear from @jsreynaud on that topic. Our company runs entirely on V5 and I would like to investigate the switch to V6 knowing I can still work on V5. @leoheck suggested it should be doable if the old packages had the version appended to the end (eg. kicad-5 or similar), it seems to match the information I’m finding.
It is quite scary to update to V6 with the changes to the symbol and schematic formats. Not because of lack of backups, but because there is no easy way to downgrade the version if V6 starts to act up and we’re seeing discrepancies on our projects compared to V5. Or is there an easy way to go back to 5.1.12 using PPA that is document somewhere?
EDIT: I have tried to downgrade from 5.1.12 to 5.1.10 to no success:
$ sudo apt-get install kicad=5.1.10
[sudo] password for francois:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Version '5.1.10' for 'kicad' was not found
$ sudo apt-get install kicad=5.1.10-202107120859+88a1d61d58~90~ubuntu20.04.1
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Version '5.1.10-202107120859+88a1d61d58~90~ubuntu20.04.1' for 'kicad' was not found
You cannot downgrade to 5.1.10 using the PPA because the PPA only keeps the most recent release of the 5.1 series.
I don’t think that there is a way in Ubuntu to easily have both kicad v6 and kicad v5 installed. That said, it is easy to downgrade to 5.1.12 if you decide to.
You can download 5.10 deb file and manually install from:
Failing that you can manually download the .deb file from:
That said, it is easy to downgrade to 5.1.12 if you decide to.
Can you please explain the “easy” method?
The way that you were trying. Except, use the package in the PPA.
sudo apt install kicad=5.1.12-202111050915+84ad8e8a86~92~ubuntu18.04.1
Use apt-cache show kicad to see what the package names available for you are
Wish I didn’t have to go there… But well how would I know which deb file to download for my computer?
Actually scratch that.
5.1.10 looks like it’s only available for Ubuntu 20.10.1
Do a
cat /etc/os-release
to see what version of Ubuntu you are on.
Ok so I guess I can live with the temporary solution of switching to V6
$ sudo apt install kicad
and then back to V5
$ sudo apt install kicad=5.1.12-202111050916+84ad8e8a86~92~ubuntu20.04.1
and not using the settings import first time V6 was run, I can find V5 back in the same state.
Thanks!
@eeintech
FYI I have updated the AppImage scripts for ubuntu focal
It should work out of the box
Feel free to report issues here
and generated two AppImage releases for kicad v5.1.12 and kicad v6.0.0 downloadable here
KiCad-5.1.12.glibc2.29-x86_64.AppImage
KiCad-6.0.0.glibc2.29-x86_64.AppImage
Edit:
Before you can run an AppImage, you need to make it executable.
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Hey, @eeintech I was trying to survive with this temporary solution myself. But Kicad is pretty big to keep downloading libs every time. So this was not good for me, even if I have a good internet connection everywhere. I just don’t like it.
Now, kicad-5 could be made available AS IT IS the kicad-nightly. It would be just a matter of replacing the --nightly suffix with the -5. It would be great during this transitioning time. It is not that much of an effort to provide this since the nightly already created this solution.
I hate to say that. Companies are pretty slow to change things. They are pretty slow to even try the change. Most of the time they are even afraid of trying. Now, there are people like you and me that do everything possible to learn and keep the new functionalities coming. With that said, It would HELP A LOT the community if people could TEST the v6 while still using v5.
Now, talking about this Kicad 6. It is a good tool. Full of features. It looks it is pretty slow, something is not right on Linux. But the change is not that hard if you already know how Kicad works. And since the files are textual. It is possible to look for issues. Most of the time, issues were on my custom libs. There the issue was with variables I was using to refer to my custom 3d models and these variables were not replaced automatically. Then I had to make sed on my .kicad_pcb and also in my libs to fix this issue. Libs are easily converted to the new version of Kicad. This is awesome. Schematics in the board can be updated from the newly converted lib by updating components in the EEschema all at once.
I was more worried about 3rd party tools that are still in process of migrating to Kicad v6 if any. The Kicad project conversion is pretty simple and straightforward. For instance, I cannot use kiri since I cannot export schematic on Kicad-6 (plotgitsch is not adapted yet to the new Kicad-6 schematic file type)
Hey @eeintech, I have a script to install and load Kicad 5.1.12 in a folder while Kicad 6 is already installed in the system. I put it here https://github.com/leoheck/parallel-kicad-5.1. It is pretty easy to install and use. Feel free to test it. my preliminary tests show that this works fine.
AppImage is a single file self containing all the needed resources… It can run without conflict with other versions and libraries…
It is the same concept of the portable apps in win…
Then you can i.e. run kv5 Appimage and having installed kicad stable v6 side by side… that’s it
Yeah sure. I just don’t know how this works. Also, does this add kicad on the command line by default? I call Kicad, 90% of the time, from the command line. And I do it more once it accepts scripts and a minimum amount of parameters like version or help as any other software does.
some info here:
With your scripts you are trying to obtain what AppImage offers.
It can be called by command line, with or without parameters and can be just added to the main Menu of the OS.
FreeCAD has embraced AppImage since long times ago to solve the coexistence of different versions of OCC, python Qt etc.
AppImage is de facto one of the most used way to distribute sw in Linux
Many upstream projects like Krita, Subsurface, MuseScore, KDevelop, and digiKam have started to provide AppImages directly on their download pages. More AppImages for other applications like Atom, Arduino, Blender, Chromium, Firefox, LibreOffice, and QCAD can be downloaded
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About version 5.99 available in official Ubuntu repositories:
Few month ago there was an error in a package upload in debian repository. So the maintainer for debian package using this versionning mecanism to work-arround this:
https://lists.launchpad.net/kicad-developers/msg45040.html
About releases.
For version 6.0 (currently 6.0.0) you have to use the PPA: ppa:kicad/kicad-6.0-releases
It will follow all updates of the 6.0 branch
For version 5.1 (currently 5.1.12) you have to use the PPA: ppa:kicad/kicad-5.1-releases
It will follow all updates of the 5.1 branch.
I will keep it active at least until the 5.1 version is supported and event after. But I think that next ubuntu releases could be difficult to support some time. I will do my best to keep it active as long as possible.
I’m not really ok to provide a way to install both version. Generally it is not possible in major distribution for a large part of applications except for nightly builds or libraries.
The proposed solution with appimage make sense for me. Currently there are some efforts from @probono and @KarlZeilhofer but I don’t know the status. If they want to propose some update it could be great. I can also try to provide/maintain appimage if they prefer to let it (ping for that: @Seth_h @stambaughw).
About nightly build
The ppa is ppa:kicad/kicad-dev-nightly. It allow separate installation from releases.
So you can have (5.1.12 and nigthly) or (6.0.0 and nightly).
It always provide a nightly build of the last commit. So sometime it’s broken:
- Build can be failed => No package in this case
- Build can be ok but the software is buggy…
- …
Generally, it’s a bad idea to use it in “production”…
Great!
you may see my fork which has the updated scripts to the latest repos (I have also added the ability to run pcbnew or eeschema in standalone):
you can also test my AppImage builds… I have tested those on Mint 20.4 LTS and it seems there are no issues:
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