The stuff of Kryton

An eclectic selection of technology with some cookery

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Project maintained by kryton-me Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham

Linux ECAD Setup

Introduction

A quick set up of tools for ECAD on a fresh Linux install. I’ll assume your are using one of the mainstream KDE / GNOME distros with comercial support options i.e. Redhat / Fedora / SuSE / Ubuntu. I’ve largly based this on support of the follwing tools: KiCAD & PicoScope

Warning curerently KiCAD still requires X11 and does not mention SuSE, it works in Wayland but often hangs when using dialogs.

Install software witout the faff

flatpacks from flathub are genrally a good cross platform method of installing applications that are sandboxed and often maintained by the app developers so are up to date.

in most distros they can be acced via the following Apps:

• KDE = “discover” application.
• Gnome = “software” application.

just make sure flathub is set up on your distro first.

ECAD tool

A professional grade yet free ECAD tool - highly recomended flatpak install flathub org.kicad.KiCad

LTSpice

Analouge’s spice tool

Install wine I’ve not suggested flathub as the Author is unknown

• Redhat / fedora sudo dnf install wine
• Debian / Unbuntu sudo apt install wine
• SUSE sudo zypper install wine

Download the windows version of LT spice

Then double click on the LTspice64.msi in your downloads folder.

To run the program press the supper key (windows) & type ltspice it should appear on a list

TINA-TI spice tool

Assuming wine is already installed

Go to the TINA-TI webpage

You will need an account with TI and to confirm what your using the tool for bofore you can download it.

Once downloaded extract the zip file Tina90-TIen.X.X.XXX.XXX.zip

Double click the Tina90-TIen.exe file, this will lunch the install wizzard

To run the program press the supper key (windows) & type tina-ti it should appear on a list

Pico Scope

For Fedora please see my guide

For Ubutu and openSUSE please ses there guide.

GUI git client for Linux

Still struggling with this one, I’ve trued the following:

• Cola git flatpak install flathub com.github.git_cola.git-cola
• Desktop plus flatpak install flathub io.github.pol_rivero.github-desktop-plus
• command line git
• git Authentication tool.

Text editor

• KDE comes with Kwrite which is pritty good
• GNOME kwrite can be installed: flatpak install flathub org.kde.kwrite

Chrome without the AI bloat, you millage may vary.

It does not have a varified flatpak on flat hub, best follow your distro.

Libre Office

It’s “.fods” format is ideal for git storeing of design calulations in a spreadsheet as it’s tracable. flatpak install flathub org.libreoffice.LibreOffice

Extensions

Virtual box drivers

Not in winget just mount from the Virtual box on the host

Update softwrae from flathub

use discover or software, on some distros (ubuntu) you need to use the application you installed to install flat hub in addtion to the distros application.