While drawing some schematics for Umeå Music Hack Space I noticed around half of my footprints aren't working. Long story short, turns out I needed to compile KiCAD because Debian chose to disable the Github plugin for getting proper footprints. This post documents the process.

First install prerequisites per this site, plus a few more:

apt-get install libwxbase3.0-dev libwxgtk3.0-dev libgl1-mesa-dev

libglew-dev libglm-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libboost-dev
libboost-thread-dev libboost-system-dev libboost-context-dev
libboost-iostreams-dev libboost-locale-dev libboost-regex-dev
libssl-dev wx-common swig libbz2-dev bzr

The Boost version at the time of writing was 1.58.

Download and extract the source code:

wget https://launchpad.net/kicad/4.0/4.0.2/+download/kicad-4.0.2.tar.xz
dtrx -n kicad-4.0.2.tar.xz

Configure using cmake:

cd kicad-4.0.2
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DKICAD_REPO_NAME=stable -DKICAD_BUILD_VERSION=4.0.2 -DKICAD_SCRIPTING=ON -DKICAD_SCRIPTING_MODULES=ON -DKICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON=ON -DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS=-std=gnu++11 -DKICAD_SKIP_BOOST=ON

Finally, we're ready to compile:

make -j3 -k; make; make

This will take half an hour or so, so go do some errands. The repeated makes are due to KiCAD's build system having some kind of depency issue or something. I have to "make" several times, so running it first with -k should get as much as possible built, then the last two takes it the rest of the way.

Finally, we're ready to install. As root just:

make install

That's it!