KiCAD from Source

Proven on:

	6 (Faye)
	12 (bookworm)

Installing KiCAD from the repositories gives you a couple silly options. Directly installing gets you a seriously outdated version and installing a FLATPAK which seems to be rather broken.

So, let's try building it from source.

(Based on: KiCAD Developer Documentation / Building KiCad from Source)

The required tools:

• sudo apt install git cmake

Get the source:

Note: This builds a non-stable version. (Whatever state the code is currently in...)

• git clone https://github.com/KiCad/kicad-source-mirror kicad

or maybe:

Note: This should build a stable version. (You can change branch to match current stable version...)

• git clone https://github.com/KiCad/kicad-source-mirror --branch 9.0 kicad

The prerequisites:

• sudo apt install swig libwxgtk3.2-dev libboost1.74-all-dev libglew-dev libglm-dev libglut-dev libcairo-dev python3-dev wxpython-tools libcurl4-openssl-dev libgit2-dev libngspice0-dev libharfbuzz-dev libocct-data-exchange-dev unixodbc-dev libgtk-3-dev libsecret-1-dev
• sudo apt install libnng-dev libprotobuf-dev protobuf-compiler

Notes:

Took a bid of further digging to learn about adding libnng-dev, libprotobuf-dev and protobuf-compiler

Set it up:

• cd kicad/
• mkdir -p build/release
• cd build/release
• cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo -DKICAD_USE_CMAKE_FINDPROTOBUF=ON ../../

Build it:

• make -j$(nproc --ignore=2)

Install it:

• sudo make install