KiCad works on Chromebooks

[bombledmonk]

I was just was just playing around on my new Lenovo Duet Chromebook Tablet (with detachable keyboard) and was learning about it’s Linux capabilities. It’s an ARM64 device I’ve not expected that much, but as I groked that it has a Debian 10 (Buster) VM it seemed fitting to try some of my favorite applications.

To my surprise and delight, typing sudo apt install kicad JustWorked™ . Now, to be fair, it was 5.0.2 in stable, but it seemed to run through schematic through gerber gen just fine. I added buster-backports and sudo apt-get -t buster-backports install kicad installs 5.1.8, but I’m haven’t quite verified it’s all working yet, I’m having some issues with plotting.

All in all it’s quite snappy, there are a few dpi issues, but nothing that would hamper real use.
Not bad for a $240 device running a Mediatek 2.0Ghz octacore with 4GB of RAM and 128GB of Storage. While I’d probably not want to layout a board on a 10" screen, the fact that so much of the K12 education and remote learning world is running on Chromebooks made this an exciting discovery for me. There’s also an easier way to install linux apps, just download a .deb file, right-click and choose “install in linux” on the menu and you don’t even have to touch the terminal. That’s how I installed VS code and it was slick.

[SembazuruCDE]

Interesting… I wonder if it will install on an RPi 400… Also an arm processor, though the default Raspian (now rebranded Raspberry Pi OS) is only 32bit.

[der.ule]

It does, there are a couple threads about it .

Export simulation data in Raspberry PI 4

Hello everyone! I’m working on a Raspberry pi 4 and it has a different ARM Cortex-A72 architecture, it is compatible with software which works on armhf architecture. So, i read the ngspice documentation and i have read this topic: I have tried to implement the code which holger suggested to the OP. On my system it would be look like this or something similar, maybe i made mistake, because sadly i’m not a linux or raspberry pi or Kicad expert. So my “code” looks like this: .tran 1m 800m …

[davidsrsb]

The Chromebook capabilities seem more suitable for KiCad than a Pi

[eeintech]

This is a bit of a misleading title, Chromebooks are just another computer and as far as I know there is no port available in ChromeOS. “KiCad works on ARM devices” seems more inline and makes me wonder if there was any “official” study on how stable is KiCad on those machines.

[bombledmonk]

Yeah, you’re probably right, but I searched google and found little information, so at least if someone else ever searches, there’s a place to land.

To be fair, there really isn’t any native installable applications “for” ChromeOS, it’s either browser based apps, android apps, or stuff installed through “experimental” linux.
The general topic of ARM stability is slightly more interesting with the release of the Apple M1 chip.

[davidsrsb]

@bombledmonk

The general topic of ARM stability is slightly more interesting with the release of the Apple M1 chip.

Which means that the MacOS version of KiCad may well have to fork, x64 emulation may be too big a performance hit

[gastropubdistaste]

@davidsrsb

x64 emulation may be too big a performance hit

Most likely the case.