Hello,
I have been using the “old stable” release of KiCad on Ubuntu 14.04 without problems, but then I decided to try the latest version. I tried installing with the kicad-install.sh, but it is a real pain.
In fact, as I’m typing the installation is running. I started at 08:30 this morning and it is now almost 11:00, and it is still getting data from the launchpad repo. Two and a half hours! And I have a fast internet connection.
Isn’t there a quicker, ‘normal’ way of installing the latest versions? No wonder most people revert to the old stable releases.
The download from the bazaar repo should only be about 200MB, that shouldn’t take too long. At later stages in the build process a few other things will be downloaded as well, but that is nowhere near enough to take hours. Compilation from scratch is a lengthy process though, the more cores you have the better.
However, I’ve noticed myself that BZR is not very efficient when transferring data, at least not when comparing to GIT. Sometimes it downloads a couple of megabytes or so and in the end only a few files have been changed.
I think kicad will be moved to github at some point in the future, which should remove this kind of badness.
I just downloaded the kicad repo from
(http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~kicad-product-committers/kicad/product/)
and it took about 10 minutes or so.
I’ve found the compilation can take hours on my poor little i5 processor… although that is in Windows, using WinBuilder. You can try use the nightly builds: http://www.kicad.org/display/KICAD/Installing+KiCad
Personally I’m looking forward to the stable release - think it’s due in July…
Yes, I think waiting for the next stable release is probably the answer, although as I said, I’m using the current stable (2013-jul-07) without problems. But there is one thing I would like to see, and that is to be able to make circular keep-out zones. I wonder if the next release will be able to do that?