I installed KiCAD8 on an older computer a couple of days ago. It is running stock Ubuntu 22.04, 64 bit. Prior to installing KiCAD8 there, I believe I wiped KiCAD7 (sudo apt remove --purge ‘kicad*’). I also wiped the directory ‘~/.config/kicad’ and ‘/.local/share/kicad’. When I try to open the pcb editor, even for example projects which were installed with KiCAD8, it crashes on startup with the following error messages:
11:40:59 PM: Failed to load shared library ‘/usr/bin/_pcbnew.kiface’: libIlmImf-2_5.so.25: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
11:40:59 PM: Failed to load kiface library ‘/usr/bin/_pcbnew.kiface’.
11:40:59 PM: Error loading editor.
11:40:59 PM: Application cannot start.
The crazy thing is that I have another computer running stock Ubuntu 22.04 and I observe no problems there! I also have no problems with KiCAD8 at work, running on Windows 10Pro. It may be the case that on the older computer, some remnants of older versions of KiCAD still exist despite my best efforts to sanitize the environment prior to installing KiCAD8, but I am not sure.
Here is the 'About" information of the KiCAD8 installation I am having trouble with:
I went through some gyrations last night. There does seem to be a problem with libopenexr25 on my Ubuntu 22.04 installation. If I try to install the development files for libopenexr-dev, I get a broken package warning on this box (but no problem on the other box running 22.04). I did reinstall libopenexr25, but then I started getting errors relating to libtiff! After searching around on the internet, I uninstalled libtiff from my anaconda distribution, but now I still get these errors:
From the synaptic graphic package manager, I tried uninstalling libopexr25, which also forced me to uninstall kicad. I proceeded. So my system was without kicad and libopenxr25. When I tried to reinstall kicad, the package manager marked it as broken! Weird! I completely uninstalled all KiCAD8 components and libopenxer25 and then told the package manager to install KiCAD8, allowing it to pull all required dependencies. Same result as above: I get the same error about LIBTIFF…
@retiredfeline, thank you very much for your insightful suggestions. ‘apt policy libtiff5’ gives different installed versions between the two machines. The machine where KiCAD8’s pcb editor runs without problems actually has an earlier version, 4.3.0, installed, while the machine where the pcb has trouble has 4.4.0 installed. I am not sure how even that could be possible, since both boxes run the same distro version. Anyway, I have a lot to look for and maybe even reinstall 22.04 (or wait to upgrade to 24.04LTS). At any rate, this is probably not a KiCAD issue, but thanks again for taking the time to help me out.