Kicad Debian Packages from GGLABS

GGLABS Kicad packages have been discontinued as updated kicad packages are now in debian backports

Kicad is the EDA software we use for all our projects. All the computers in our lab use GNU/Linux (either debian or Mint LMDE). The kicad version in the debian repository is from the stable kicad branch so it is quite old (Nov 2014) and missing many useful features. After manually compiling kicad for several months we decided to write a script to automatically generate a proper debian package and make the packages available to the public.

Download and Install

The simplest way to get the latest release of the package on your system is to add the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list (or to a new file called /etc/apt/sources.list.d/kicad.list)
deb ftp://penguintown.net/debian jessie main
deb-src ftp://penguintown.net/debian jessie main


Alternatively you can browse our ftp, download the version you prefer and manually install it using dpkg.

The packages are currently only available for amd64. If you use a different architecture, download the source packages, uncompress them with dpkg-source and generate the binary archives with dpkg-buildpackage.

We are still trying to figure out how to automate the package signing, so for the time being they are not. The message "WARNING: The following packages cannot be authenticated!" referring to kicad is expected and it is safe to answer yes to the "Install these packages without verification?" question.

Finally, the package only includes the binaries (i.e. no libraries and no documentation).

Build Scripts

For advanced users we also provide the build scripts we use to create the packages. The archive contains 2 scripts and a directory with all the debian specific files.
Download the archive, uncompress it and run the "run_me_once" script. This will initialize the kicad bzr repository, download the latest version and download the required boost 1.54.0 source package.
When all the downloading is finished, run the "build_kicad" script. If everything went well, the binary package will be placed in the same directory.
To build a new version just run the "build_kicad" script (there is no need to run the "run_me_once" again). build_kicad will update an existing bzr repository and build the binaries.