I’m doing some experimenting on a virtual machine right now. KiCad takes d*** long time to compile so it will be ready or failed tomorrow morning. Up to this moment here are some notes:
Read the last section in https://kicad.org/download/debian/ and install those dependencies. I tried another route so I’m not sure is these are up to date.
An easy way to install dependencies on Debian and all derivatives is apt build-dep. Make sure you have the source repository enabled, not just the binary repository. Then run “sudo apt build-dep kicad”. It installs all build-time dependencies for the kicad version which is in the used repository, including build tools. I did this on a minimal clean desktop (lxde) install and it installed over 2.5Gb of stuff.
Unfortunately there’s no nightly builds for Debian. There are for Ubuntu, and building is really easy there after enabling the nightly build PPA (with src) and using build-dep. The latest kicad source has a bit different build dependencies than 4.0.x, so build-dep doesn’t work out of the box. Hopefully the website instructions have those missing packages, at least boost and oce are in that list. I disabled oce in cmake configuration so I didn’t need that.
For configuration I recommend cmake-gui (“apt install cmake-gui”, run “cmake-gui”). Give the source and build destination directories. Click “Configure” once. Enable and disable what you want. You have to disable ngspice (see the web page). I also had to remove the lines where there should have been the ngspice related directories. Now you have to click “Configure” maybe a couple more times until there are no red lines. That’s a bit strange, but that’s how it works. When there’s no red or errors left, click Generate. If you run into errors, you have to install some more -dev packages.
Now you can exit and you’re ready to run make and “sudo make install”.
P.S. Right now it’s in 61%. See you later…