Manage Footprint Libraries causes Kicad to crash

Software
1

I have upgraded Kicad from v4 to v5.1, running Kicad on Ubuntu Linux. When I select ‘Manage Footprint Libraries’ from ‘Preferences’ Kicad crashes (stops). I have to reinvoke to get Kicad back up. If I select ‘Manage Symbol Libraries’ the ‘Symbol Libraries’ window comes up and everything looks good.
It seems that I can do nothing with the Footprint editor, it just wont start and causes Kicad to crash.
Should I pose this to a different group?

2

I am not the expert here; but I think that any time KiCad crashes it probably justifies a bug report. In KiCad see help-about for a link to GitLab for reporting bugs.

3

A crash is definetly a bug. You might stil want to read these two topics to be prepared for what lies ahead once you know why it crashes and have fixed that.

4

And be more precise by what you mean by “5.1”

1 Like
5

According to Kicad - Help/ About Kicad / I have Version 5.1.5-52549c5 - Ubuntu 16.04.1, release build.
But my Ubuntu is now version 18.04. I updated my Kicad after I updated to 18.04. In linux TERM, I checked /home/jimh12/.config/kicad/ , it has a sym-lib-table and a fp-lib-table item but they don’t appear to be sub-directories. I checked at /usr/share/kicad/library I see a bunch of .dcm and .lib files.

I will gladly evaluate other items that you might want to know.

Thank you, Jim Harris

1 Like
6

the library tables are text files that hold the information where the real libs are located (see Library management in KiCad version 5 for details)

The fact that KiCad thinks you are under 16.04 might mean you installed KiCad from the wrong source. Could be either you entered the wrong repo or there is something wrongly setup with your package manager. I suspect that KiCad compiled for 16.04 might expect different dependencies than you have on 18.04 which could explain the crash. If that is the case then the library tables might not have anything to do with what you see.

I have too little experience with apt (the package manager) to be of help here as I use a dnf (successor to yum) based linux distro.

1 Like
7

I agree with @Rene_Poschl
Somehow you have picked up the wrong repository.
The libraries are not 100% compatible between 16.04 and 18.04 and strange crashes would be the result

8

I believe in this context libraries mean binary programming libraries, not KiCad component libraries. Just to make sure…

1 Like
9

Yes, the linked common libraries, especially libc, gtk etc

10

3 posts were split to a new topic: Quesion about libraries between KiCad versions

11

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