New User with v6 - What am I doing wrong? (add symbol to schematic)

I just installed v6. I’ve never used KiCad before.

I’m not able to add a symbol to a schematic. Nothing shows as a preview and there is no title block on the screen either.

I installed it on another PC and it seems to work just fine.

Are they both the same OS? What OS are we talking about here?

Can you add a screenshot?

Image attached.

It works on an old Windows 8.1 laptop.

Problems are on a Windows 10 Pro, 64 bit virtual machine.

I installed the last build for v5 and had the same issue in the VM.

Don’t know if this is the problem or not, but there are a bunch of weird graphics problems that crop up in VMs and running in a virtual machine is not supported by KiCad.

You could try changing between accelerated and fallback graphics (Preferences → Display Options → change the rendering engine setting). You could also try playing with the graphics drivers & settings in your VM but I don’t know where to start.

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Thanks! Switching to Fallback graphics seemed to do the trick.

I see that you say running in a VM is not supported so I will keep that in mind if I have future issues. The VM is really my preferred development environment these days…

Glad to hear it!

…20char

Can you say a word or two - why?
I have never even tried VM. I just would like to know what are the advantages I don’t know.

A few reasons.

At my day job, I work for an OEM of industrial equipment. Some of our suppliers have software packages that are known to interfere with each other. Putting each supplier’s software in a separate VM solved this issue.

I sometimes travel to do technical work. I can keep a copy of the necessary VMs on a large USB memory stick or external hard disk. If my laptop crashes or dies, I can buy or borrow another PC and be back up and running in less than an hour. (Some of the software packages I use are quite large to download and take several hours to fully install and configure.)

I have to support some old equipment that uses a piece of SCADA software which only supports a single installed version. So I have about different 8 different VMs for each SCADA release, going back 15+ years.

Some old equipment I support requires the use of ancient software that will only run in a Windows XP DOS box. The Windows XP machine runs just fine as a VM.

No risk of installing a new piece of unknown software and corrupting my entire PC.

Basically, my host PC is restricted to MS Office and email. Then I have numerous VMs as described above. One VM is what I call my “sandbox”. I use it for stuff like KiCad, Microchip Studio, and the million other utilities that I need to install but don’t wish to clutter up the OS on my host machine.

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Thanks for explanation.

I have at my desk 3 PCs (one of them is XP). It looks that going above the number 3 will force me to apply your solution :slight_smile:

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On MacOS this seems to happen repeatably in the Symbol Editor window. The solution is to double-click the item.(Battery_Cell in your example).

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