kicad-developers team mailing list archive

["Brian Sidebotham" <brian.sidebotham@...>]

Hi guys,

I made some notes about compiling Kicad from SVN under Ubuntu Intrepid
8.10, after getting a small HP2133 laptop and installing Ubuntu on it
:)
I also noted that there are no instructions on the Wiki for building
Kicad under any Linux platform.

Half the battle is getting the dependencies for the kicad build, the
following is a list of what I did to compile Kicad from SVN:

Get the dependencies:

Run Accessories | Terminal, and type:

(1a) Get the programs needed for compilation (Yes, Ubuntu comes
without gcc and g++!)

sudo apt-get install gcc g++ subversion cmake

(1b) Get the libraries:

sudo apt-get install libbtkglext1-dev libgtkgl2.0-1 libgtkgl2.0-dev
libgtk2.0-dev libboost-dev

(1c) I recommend getting the following libraries too, although they
are not actually required:

sudo apt-get install libpng12-0 libpng12-dev libtiff4 libtiff4-dev
libexpat1 libexpat1-dev libgnomeui-dev libgnomeprintui2.2-dev

(2a) Download WxWidgets source:

Download the latest wxGTK source package from
http://www.wxwidgets.org/downloads/

Move the tar.gz archive to your home folder, and then in terminal type:

cd ~
tar xzf wxGTK-2.8.9.tar.gz
cd wxGTK-2.8.9
mkdir build-release
cd build-release

(2b) Configure wxWidgets for Kicad

Now type the following:

../configure --enable-unicode --enable-monolithic --disable-shared --with-opengl

WxWidgets will now configure. If there are no problems with
configuring type the following:

(2c) Compile WxWidgets

Type:

make

It takes a while for wxWidgets to build, around 15min on a 1.2GHz
processor with 1Gb RAM.

(2d) Install WxWidgets:

Type:

sudo make install
sudo ldconfig

Once installed, you can check that the installation was successful by typing:

wx-config --version

and check that the version shown matches the source package you downloaded.

(3a) Download SVN Source for Kicad:

>From the terminal still, type:

cd ~
svn co https://kicad.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/kicad/trunk/kicad kicad

This will download the main kicad source trunk and place all the
source files in a directory called kicad in your home directory. Do
this operation in another folder if you want the source to be located
somewhere else.

(3b) Generate the Makefiles for Kicad:

Navigate to the kicad source directory, and make a directory for
building the code:

cd kicad
mkdir -p build/release
cd build/release

Run Cmake to generate the makefiles:

cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ../../

(3c) Build the Kicad Source:

Just type:

make

Make a cup of tea, it takes some time to build the source tree.

(3d) Install Kicad

Once built, type:

sudo make install

to install kicad. You will find links to Kicad under the Applications
| Programming menu (for some reason!)

(4) Stay up-to-date

In future to update kicad, simply navigate to the kicad source
directory and type:

svn up
make
sudo make install

Best Regards,

Brian Sidebotham.