Since a number of users have reported problems on various platforms, I want to give some tips and also list the known ways this problem can happen. There may also be unknown ways that we need to uncover.
The symbol library table and footprint library table files store the library setups for each KiCad installation. For a while now (since some point during the 5.99 nightly builds), KiCad supports versioned configuration directories, meaning that each KiCad installation can have its own library tables.
A symptom of “no libraries found” usually means one of two things:
- The library table file is missing or empty
- The library table file contains references to libraries that KiCad can’t find.
(1) normally happens when you install a “lite” version of KiCad (for platforms that support this concept) which comes with no libraries. The first time you launch KiCad and start the symbol or footprint chooser, you’ll be asked how to set up the library table. The recommended choice of copying the default library table will be greyed out, because in the lite version, no libraries are available. Unless you manually choose a valid library table in this dialog, any action you take here will result in empty library lists. This should never happen for a full-version KiCad installation. If you see this happen, it’s a bug either with the packaging or KiCad itself that needs to be reported.
(2) normally happens when a newer version of KiCad is using an older library table. For example, if you continue using a KiCad 5.1 library table with KiCad 6. Because this doesn’t work, we don’t support migrating library tables from old versions even when you choose to migrate other preferences. However, there was an issue where earlier release candidates of 6.0 did allow you to migrate your library tables, which would result in broken library configurations.
Therefore, it is a known issue that if you installed an early release candidate / nightly build of 6.0, and you chose to migrate your preferences from an earlier version of KiCad, you probably faced the problem of missing libraries. This should not be possible anymore with the stable release of 6.0. If you see this problem, it’s also a bug that needs to be reported.
We are currently unaware of any root cause of this happening on any platform, however we have had several Ubuntu users report that the default library tables (for example /usr/share/kicad/template/sym-lib-table) did not get updated to the 6.0 version when they updated the kicad package from 5.1 to 6.0. This results in the above problem, and can be fixed by completely uninstalling kicad (check that there is nothing left in /usr/share/kicad) and reinstalling it, and then removing the symbol/footprint library tables from your preferences folder (~/.config/kicad/6.0/) in order to get prompted to copy the global defaults again.