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How to get PCB ?

This page contains information about how to download and install PCB on your computer.

Prerequisites

Operating System

Currently PCB runs on unix like operating systems such as Linux, NetBSD, Solaris, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, etc. In addition PCB will work on a windows computer using cygwin. It is also possible to compile PCB using mingw on windows using the win32/build_pcb.sh script.

Installing a Pre-Built Package

Debian

apt-get install pcb

Fedora

To automatically download and install the latest version (and dependencies) from one of the (pre-configured) Fedora repositories:

yum install pcb

For the installation with yum you need administrator-privileges.

To install a manually downloaded rpm:

yum localinstall <rpmfilename>

Where is the downloaded rpm of your choice. Required dependencies need to be downloaded and installed simultaneously, or beforehand.

"localinstall" is used to install a set of local rpm files. If required the enabled repositories will be used to resolve dependencies. Note that the install command will do a local install, if given a filename. This option is maintained for legacy reasons only.

"localupdate" is used to update the system by specifying local rpm files. Only the specified rpm files of which an older version is already installed will be installed, the remaining specified packages will be ignored. If required the enabled repositories will be used to resolve dependencies. Note that the update command will do a local update, if given a filename. This option is maintained for legacy reasons only.

Gentoo

emerge pcb

NetBSD

See ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/cad/pcb/README.html.

Ubuntu

Update the package index:

sudo apt-get update

Install pcb deb package:

sudo apt-get install pcb

External Libraries

  • GUI toolkit. Currently PCB supports either gtk or lesstif/motif based guis. If you are using the GTK based gui, you will need gtk-2.4.0 or newer. If you are using the lesstif based gui you will need lesstif, openmotif, or motif.
  • If you wish to export your layout to png, jpeg, or gif formats you will need the GD library. If you do not have this library you will need to disable the png HID at configure time.
  • GNU m4. In particular your m4 must support -F for frozen files. wish (part of tcl/tk). If not installed, set WISH=/bin/false in your configure environment and you just won't get the graphical QFP footprint builder
  • A suitable make program. GNU make will work as will the make which comes with NetBSD and some of the other *BSD operating systems. Other system make programs have not been tested.
    • flex
    • bison
  • A C compiler. Although most development of PCB is done using gcc, PCB is known to build with the Sun Studio C compiler.

Download the Sources from Released files

PCB is distributed in source code format. Periodic releases are made which help the average user build and install the software. The latest releases may be found on the PCB Released files page.

Building and Installing from Source

Unpacking the tarball

Place the tarball (pcb-x.y.z.tar.gz) in a temporary directory.

(where x.y.z is the version)

Unpack the tarball with:

tar -xvzf pcb-x.y.z.tar.gz

Building pcb from Source

./configure --disable-update-desktop-database --disable-update-mime-database --with-gui=gtk 
make
make distcheck

Installing pcb

make install

This requires sudo rights.

Tracking the Latest

PCB uses git for source code management.

To perform an initial check out of PCB sources via anonymous GIT, run the following:

git clone https://github.com/gEDA-pcb-developers/pcb.git

Users intending to do development work on PCB, and/or submit patches should ideally check out from the git repository.

Problems compiling pcb

When I try to bootstrap and build the git or anonymous CVS version, autogen.sh complains of configure.in missing

Make sure you have a recent version of autoconf installed. Version 2.13 is too old.

Try running

autoconf --version

to figure out what version you have.

configure complains that wish is not found, but I have TCL/TK installed!

If you get a message like the following:

configure: error: Did not find the wish executible. You need to make sure that tcl is installed on your system and that wish is in your path

This can happen if the wish program that comes with TK is not called "wish" on your system.

In this case, you need to set the WISH environment variable to the complete path to the wish executible.

For example in sh/ksh/bash:

WISH=/usr/bin/wish83
export WISH

or in csh/tcsh:

setenv WISH /usr/bin/wish84

Now when you run the ./configure script, it should be possible to find wish.

When compiling, yywrap is missing during linking.

If you get a message like the following:

    Undefined         first referenced
     symbol                in file
     yywrap               parse_l.o
     ld: fatal: Symbol referencing errors. No output....

when trying to compile PCB, it is probably because you do not have flex installed on your system or the configure script did not find it.

You may need to help out configure if flex is not installed in the standard system library directory.

For example, if you have installed flex in /opt/flex then you'll want to use something like:

env LDFLAGS="-L/opt/flex/lib" ./configure

to make sure the linker can find libfl.a.