Hi,
i try to switch from 4.x to 5.0.2 and installed KiCad on Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS using flatpak.
Now i recognize, that i can not open, view or create a project that is nested within a symbolic link path. E.g. my mounted Harddrives. Just Desktop and other places work.
Within the “Create new Project” dialog e.g. the path /media or the /mnt directories are not listed.
Please give me an advice.
Klaus
Could this be a flatpak restriction? Some of these multi distribution binary systems do not allow data access outside of a specifically prepared path.
This is a limitation of how the KiCad Flatpak was setup, not of KiCad itself. The Flatpak was configured only to allow the user to access the home directory from the host machine, so it can only access files from inside of there (this applies to both libraries and projects). This will also prevent the symbolic links from working, since those will take it outside the /home directory.
A flatpak package is run with “flatpak” program which should have a command line switch to add a directory to be r/w. I don’t remember the details, see flatpak documentation.
Hi, thx for your fast response and to give me a direction. Maybe i will do a normal installation again 
Thx, Klaus
The current KiCad stable release is 5.1.2, and is a better choice than the flatpak 5.0.2 version.
Yeah, the KiCad Flatpak is extremely old. It actually wasn’t originally packaged by a KiCad dev either, so it has been out of maintenance for a few years. The actual Flatpak maintainers tried a recent update, but apparently the libraries were posing a problem, and they never sorted them out. Additionally, it was originally made without Python support so it is fairly out of step with the actual packages for most other platforms.
I am working on reviving the package, but it is a fairly complex process since you have to build everything you depend on in your package spec, and adding the Python support to that is somewhat challenging. I am hoping I can get a 5.1.2 release with Python support working soon, but no promises on a time frame.
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