[Solved] How to do a completely clean install on macOS?

Software
1

I had an old kicad v4 on my machine, and since I didn’t have any custom libraries, thought it would be a good idea to purge all vestiges of it from my laptop. I essentially did a

find / -iname "*kicad*" -print

… and deleted all resulting directories and files. Then I installed kicad-unified-5.0.1 following the usual instructions. However, I must have missed something, since when I launch kicad.app, the icons for eeschema and pcbnew (and a couple of others) are grayed out.

I don’t have any kicad files I care about keeping. How do I get back to a completely fresh state for installing 5.0.1?

P.S.:

ProductName: Mac OS X
ProductVersion: 10.14.3
BuildVersion: 18D109
2

You simply need to remove the kicad settings from your personal profile.
More detailed description is found here: I had KiCad 4 installed previosly. Now i updated to v5. Now i have some problems with the library setup (Option 1 is what you are looking for)

3

Are you certain this is the fix? Before re-installing KiCad 5, I completely deleted the following directories:

/Application Support/kicad
/Applications/kicad
/Applications/KiCad
~/Library/Saved Application State/org.kicad-pcb.*
~/Library/Preferences/kicad
~/Library/Preferences/org.kicad-pcb.*
~/Library/Caches/kicad/*
~/.cache/kicad/

… which certainly accomplished the “simply remove the kicad settings from your personal profile” requirement. I then did a fresh install of /Applications/KiCad and /Library/Application Support/kicad from the .dmg mount point.

As I mentioned, now when I launch /Applications/KiCad/kicad.app, the icons for eeschema, pcbnew, the symbol library editor and the footprint library editor are grayed out.

I’m beginning to think that macOS quarantining may be the culprit: these are all apps I’d opened under v4, and I note this comment in the ReadMe file:

You must open KiCad first before opening the standalone apps, or else the standalone apps won’t be able to open up due to macOS quarantining.

Is there a way to make macOS forget that it has seen an app before? That might help.

4

You need to have a project open for these to be runable.

1 Like
5

Well DANG! That was easy (and kinda stooopid of me!) :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

Many thanks. All good now.

[Note: although my real problem was a PICNIC issue (Problem In Chair, Not In Computer), the recipe I gave above for deleting all the old kicad state may be useful for someone else looking to do a clean re-install under macOS.]

1 Like
6

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