Uninstall ngspice

I installed KiCad 5.1.9 on Manjaro x86_64 about 2 month ago and got it working step by step.

To personalize the installation I copied reduced libs ( just components I use) over into my home directory. All worked fine. Then I tried to get the simulation up and running, and failed heavily. After I put days into this I decided to use LTspice. After one hour starting with the download I got results…

Right now I see a problem that seems to be caused by ngspice. I made a schematic and all went absolutely fine in particular “save” and “open” until I put my kicad work aside for a few days. Today I wanted to resume but no .sch files will open anymore. I get 2 error messages:

/usr/bin/_eeschema.kiface can not be loaded and
/usr/lib/libngspice.so.0: undefined symbol: history_file

Both files are at their correct location, there was no clean up or maintenance on the PC in the meantime. Please advice me what to do.

…and one more thing: I would like to totally remove ngspice from this installation. Where can I find instructions how to do this.

Thank you

Instructions for installing and updating ngspice in KiCad are in:
http://ngspice.sourceforge.net/ngspice-eeschema.html

On my own linux box, I think I can remove ngspice with apt, (but I won’t).

paul@medion:~$ apt search ngspice
i A libngspice0                     - Spice circuit simulator - library         
p   libngspice0-dev                 - Spice circuit simulator - development file
p   ngspice                         - Spice circuit simulator                   
p   ngspice-dev                     - Spice circuit simulator - development file
p   ngspice-doc 

Can you still create a new project and start a new schematic in it?
Did you do weird things to your install and damaged the installation yourself?

If you’re not interested in what went wrong, but just want to get it to work again, a complete removal and re-installation of KiCad may be the easiest way forward.

And I assume it may help d

Thank you for coming back so fast.

I think a new installation is probabely the fast and easy way to cure things.
However I wonder if there is a package w/o ngspice. That would be a clean system
Otherwise I doubt that all remains can be removed.

To answer your question of selfdestruction of my system: I did nothing that I can think of could have an impact on kicad. However I remember there was a big update package from manjaro.
They sure know what they are putting out but there is always a chance for something to go wrong.

Maybe somebody can find a cause in those two error messages. I would feel much better if I knew what happened.

The ngspice error is a packaging issue. See this (and other messages in the thread): https://lists.launchpad.net/kicad-developers/msg44875.html

A similar thing happened to Arch not long ago. https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/70563

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Removing the ngspice package won’t help because the KiCad package has been compiled against it.

The error messages mean some kind of library mismatch (programming library, not EDA library). Probably the ngspice library which was used when compiling KiCad is different version than what is now found in the system.

@radix
I had a short look into the link and am convinced that this might be it. I shall dig deeper into this matter tomorrow.

@eelik
Do I understand this correctly, there is no way to get a kicad version w/o ngspice? This is no promise for longterm stability from my point of view. Problems of this kind could and would repeat over and over again if coordination of these two products is not perfect at all times.
The best strategy would be to set up a good working installation and disregard all updates.

Do I understand this correctly, there is no way to get a kicad version w/o ngspice

You can build kicad yourself without ngspice by setting the relevant build flags. Kicad packaged for Arch (and therefore Manjaro) requires ngspice. Same for most other distributions.

Problems of this kind could and would repeat over and over again if coordination of these two products is not perfect at all times.
The best strategy would be to set up a good working installation and disregard all updates.

The error message in question here is a one-time issue with Arch’s ngspice package, not kicad. There was a change to how ngspice needs to be built/packaged, and the Arch ngspice package initially did not implement this change. That has been fixed and updating your ngspice package should resolve the issue. I don’t see why there would be any longterm stability issue here.

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Good package managers handle version conflicts. Manjaro (or perhaps Arch) appears to broken this.

If this behavior concerns you and you don’t want to switch distributions, you can install the flatpak kicad.org/download/flatpak/ that will contain all build dependencies.

@gkeeth,
looks like my last update implemented the bug into my system. As that must have happened a short time ago I do not assume manjaro has rectified it by now. I think an installation from the Arch website is the safe way.
Do you have a Rev Number or is it a nightly I have to look for?

@Seth_h,
Thank you for the link. I am really happy with manjaro, it runs smooth and stable and if you come to a dead end… Arch is around to help. The plan is to get kicad running again by any means. After all its a highly valued and very usable product for me.

@ all,
It will take a few days to follow the plan, but I shall post results here. Thanks to all for the imidiate and extremely competent help you gave me. Basically I am just a user of kicad
w/o information of internals. This response build up a lot of confidence…

the ngspice update with the packaging bug was ngspice 34-1. It was updated/repackaged within a day or two, and 34-2 works fine. You should be able to resolve it with a normal package update (pacman -Syu), or pacman -S ngspice to reinstall ngspice if you uninstalled it.

Thank you for this information. I will use it at this weekend and let you know the result.

@gkeeth and others who helped,
this morning I got a major manjaro update including

kicad 5.1.10-1
ngspice 34-2

All is working fine again - thanks again to all - issue solved and thread closed

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