How To – Install KiCad

KiCad is an “Electronic Design Automation” application, or “EDA”.

It is really a suite of design applications that integrate very tightly with each other to provide a “Computer Aided Design” environment suitable for designing “Printed Circuit Boards”, or “PCB’s” for short.

It encompasses the entire design cycle, from circuit schematic capture, to PCB layout and routing, to producing the full set of automation files (such as Gerber files) for the commercial production of those PCB’s.

Installing on Debian 12

At the time of writing this article, Debian 12 only includes KiCad V6 in it’s standard repository. However, V8 is available in the bookworm-backports repository. While the latest version of KiCad is normally available as a FlatPak package, my experience of using this has been less than ideal so is not my preferred option.

Adding Backports to apt

First thing to do is check to see if backports has already been added as a repository for apt to use. To do this open a terminal window and type:

cat /etc/apt/sources.list

and look for the following line somewhere in the output:

deb https://deb.debian.org/debian/ bookworm-backports main contrib non-free non-free-firmware

If the above line is present then backports are already available. If not, then add it to /etc/apt/sources.list by typing the following command into your open terminal window:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

and add the missing line to the end of the file and save it.

Installing KiCad from backports

All backports are deactivated by default so that the normal operation of a stable installation will not be compromised by potentially disruptive changes. Therefore the repository has to be explicitly specified in the apt installation command like this:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install -t bookwork-backports kicad

This will perform an install of the standard KiCad application suite. However, by default the 3D Models library is not installed due to it’s size (around 5GB at the time this article was written). Though the symbols, footprints and templates libraries do seem to be installed by default.

While the 3D Models library is not a necessity for using KiCad, I do find that the ability to display a 3D Model of any designed PCB to be very useful when checking for design mistakes prior to sending off to be manufactured. To install the 3D Models library use the following command (it may take a while to complete):

sudo apt install -t bookworm-backports kicad-packages3d

I have found these two install lines to be sufficient for a full local install. However, if you find that there are missing libraries or components, then the following backport packages are also available separately:

  • kicad-libraries => Common kicad libraries
  • kicad-symbols => Schematic symbols for the schematic editor
  • kicad-footprints => Component footprints for the PCB editor
  • kicad-templates => Project templates for KiCad
  • kicad-doc-en => KiCad help files in English
  • kicad-demos => Sample demonstration projects for KiCad

Checking Which Components of KiCad are Installed

The simplest way to check is to open a terminal window and type:

ls -la /usr/share/kicad/

The resulting directory names are fairly self explanatory.

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