I have been running kicad on 16.04 before without problems. After upgrading to 18.04 it still worked for a while, then suddenly the simulation stopped working. I have no clue as to why it failed. What happens is that if I invoke the simulator from eeschema the simulation window does not show and eeschema hangs idle and unresponsive so I have to force close it.
I tried to reinstall kicad but got version 4 from Canonicals official ppa, I added js-reynaud/kicad-5/ubuntu bionic ppa
and after purging the old install reinstalled from there. It did not work. Thinking that it may depend on ngspice I installed it from the official ppa, it seems to be version 27. Now it worked.
I need the pspice behaviour and that was implemented in 28 as I understand it. So I tried to download the ngspice-30 tarball and compile and install it and fixed the symlinks as per instructions elsewhere here. Simulation stopped working again. Removed the downloaded version, still no good. Reinstalled 27, still no go. Reinstalled kicad and then 27, no go. Purged everything I could find including ~/.config/kicad. Reinstalled kicad-5, no go. Reinstalled ngspice-27 and now it works again. Purged all again, reinstalled kicad-5, then ngspice-30, no go. Purged and reinstalled ngspice-5 followed by ngspice-27 and it works.
I have absolutely no clue what is going on here. Kicad can’t simulate with its companion package ngspice-kicad. Only with 27 but not 30. Anyone have a hint? What should I try?
System is intel based 64 bit. Using xubuntu as desktop environment.
By the way, the tarball makefiles have errors in the uninstall target. “-rm” does not work, changed to “rm”.
I start kicad from the command line but the only output I have seen is Gtk related warnings. The shared objects are normally stored in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ on an Ubuntu while the tarball stores them in /usr/local/lib/
If you scroll it down by searching for ./configure, then you will see the configure flags used to make shared ngspice. You might try these with the ngspice-30 tarball.
The dash prefix tells make to ignore the exit status of a shell command in a recipe. It works fine except when make uninstall recurses into xspice. Here make for some reason isn’t recognizing the dash prefix (-rm) and fails causing make to give up. I tried to find a reason but it’s a lot of code
This is what I had to do:
Download ngspice, libncurses6 and libtinfo6 from https://packages.debian.org/buster/
cd where the downloads are
sudo apt install ./libtinfo6_6.1+20181013-1_amd64.deb
sudo apt install ./libncurses6_6.1+20181013-1_amd64.deb
sudo apt install ./ngspice_30.2-1_amd64.deb
That worked but the two libs are in buster test and I’m not sure they are going to be backported to 18.04 LTS which is the current long time release with end of life April 2023. Next LTS should be in 2020, 20.04.
