According to Adam Wolf and some of the other nice folks over at the #kicad channel on freenode, wxWidgets has caused a LOT of problems for the builds recently. If you’re on 14.04 it requires a secondary backport ppa in order to work properly.
Last night, I gave up the fight.
On my 14.10 Ubuntu VM, I had problems where the copper pours would crash about every 3rd time I tried to fill them. I caught many of these on camera while I was filming for Contextual Electronics (fun!). After some investigation, it turns out that I had multiple versions of wxWidgets, likely from when I was still doing the kicad-install.sh script method of installing. I had tried a couple of apt-get builds in the process of doing that (because of error messages), so I’m guessing it was actually my fault in the end. However, it looked like I had version 2.8 AND 3.0 of wxWidgets on my machine. I now use the js reynaud nightly builds, and it was expecting 3.0.1 for wxWidgets. So it was probably something in there.
The long and the short of it is: I gave up. I started up a new VM, installed 14.10 from scratch and re-installed the nightly build of KiCad from the js reynaud ppa. Early testing indicates that it works much better and other people on Twitter and the kicad IRC seem to concur that there are far fewer issues. It’s unfortunate that I had to give up, but I suppose that’s the benefit of a VM vs having to reinstall an entire system. It’s also a bit annoying that this kind of stuff happens, but with the pricetag and the bounty I have received from using KiCad so far, I’m the last person who is allowed to complain.
Just wanted to document my woes here. Sometimes you gotta start fresh.