Installing Kicad on Ubuntu 18.04 without all packages

Hi,

I’m setting up a very constrained system and trying to install just Kicad, the symbols and footprints. I don’t want the 3d data, nor all the Spice interfaces, etc. I’m looking at the instructions on the download page at kicad.org and following the manual install steps, but apt insists on pulling in all 5.2GB of stuff, regardless. The commands I’m using are:

sudo add-apt-repository --yes ppa:js-reynaud/kicad-5
sudo apt update
sudo apt install kicad

Is there any way on 18.04 to install just a limited set of apps & libraries?

Eric

Install synaptic package manager, search for kicad (considering you’ve already added ppa source) &
select individual packages for installation. If it highlights 3d package de-select it.
iirc ngspice is also optional and can be de-selected.
I’m on windows machine at work else I could’ve shared screenshots…

this page suggests first “apt download” then “dpkg -i --ignore-depends=<…>”

footprints (122 Mb) and symbols (68 Mb) can be had with “git clone” from github.

I’ve also tried Synaptic. The only packages it shows for 5.0.2 are Kicad (which includes all the other cruft) and the various language docs.

I’ll look at the apt download + dpkg -i --ignore-depends…" approach.

dpkg is the low level tool that is doing the real installation under the hood. So if you want to use this tool you should be really familiar with that tool.

The easiest way on a CLI is to use apt, apt-get or aptitude. The answer you searching fr can be found if you open the man page for theses tools. The same is achievable with synaptics btw.

E.g.
you@uourmachine $ man apt

You will see that you should use the option --no-install-recommends.

So your command would be:
you@uourmachine $ sudo apt install kicad --no-install-recommends

In the long run you should get really familiar with the options of that tools!

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I have KiCad installed with synaptic. No footprint, symbols nor packages3D installed.
Uncheck the packages you don’t want.

update your ppa… there are 2 different ppa for 5 & 5.1


remember to remove ver 5 ppa from source list to avoid confusion

OK - I used the 5.1 ppa that apurvdate suggested and that works. In synaptic I had to uncheck the pref setting to make suggestions dependencies and then I had to accept all the dependencies and then unmark the 3D stuff. That saved me most of the space that I wanted. Unmarking the Spice stuff seems to cancel the whole install so that wasn’t possible.

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