I'm trying to get KiCad up and running but the package I installed from one of the repos seems to want a library I can't find.

I installed wxGTK3 and wxGTK from the alien slackbuilds but that particular file doesn't seem to be included. Any idea how to fix this?

Have you tried to build the latest release?

I have been building kicad using the kicad-all slackbuild in Ponce's (current) repo on github. My most recent build was 09/26/2020. The info file for kicad states that wxPython3, ngspice, OpenCASCADE and glm are require to build it. I either had already built them from slackbuilds found in the same repo or built them at that time in order to build kicad. Nice thing about that slackbuild is that it also builds the docs, symbols, footprints and templates which you might not get in a 3rd party package.

Yeah it was dependency hell too. Gave up after chasing down missing libraries and deciding on if they should be compiled or installed from third party repos.

I decided to try the sbopkg system. Kicad needs OpenCASCADE, which bombs out with

Which yields exactly one hit on a Chinese forum.

Did you install the required package VTK for OpenCASCADE?

VTK is building now.

KiCad has a Flatpak package. Does anyone have Flatpak binaries for Slackware?

VTK build failed for some reason. I tracked down packages for VTK and OpenCASCADE.


Bringing me back to the original problem. The KiCad package for 14.2 needs I installed libwxGTK2 but the file in question is not in that package.

Managed to pull the missing files (several more) from various rpm packages floating around. Now KiCad claims to need However this library already exists. I'm done. Wasted enough time on this bullshit. No wonder I keep a Windows VM in the background to run engineering software.

A rule of thumb is that when a binary package does not work, compile from source. I've been following every minor version of kicad-5.1 and never had a problem.

There are no more than a few tens of packages to install to satisfy the dependencies of kicad. All of them are available on SlackBuilds.org IIRC.

Yes, that is my experience. I don't recall if or what I had to build in order to build kicad and later kicad-all from Ponce's repo as I updated my current install every three or so months. Some of the dependencies were already installed from slackbuilds as required by something else. I have over 50 slackbuild built builds onboard right now.

I admit it takes a lot of patience to chase all these dependencies. I installed kicad with sboinstall from sbotools package which does all the process automatically. It can take a while depending on machine power to compile all if none were already installed but at least it works

libwx_gtk2u_gl-3.0.so.0 should be generated with the ' --with-gtk=2 \' line which is in the sbo wxGTK3 package for 14.2 : https://slackbuilds.org/repository/1...raries/wxGTK3/
I think that playing too much with rpm packages can lead to failure and unstable systems.

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Have you tried the sbopkg tool and generated the queue files for all packages?
- "sqg -a" (to generate all queue files)
- "sbopkg -i package" (to build with the complete queue dependency file for your package)

You can even use the -current tree instead of the -14.2 branch. It may help solve a lot of your dependancy problems.

I was able to finally build 5.1.9 from Ponce Slackbuild after rebuilding wxPython4 and wxGTK3 a couple of times.