Section "Device" Identifier "Intel Graphics" Driver "intel" EndSection
This page is just a small note on some "weird" issues that have been experienced with KiCad in relation to the systems that it runs on. This means that this page does not describe KiCad functional bugs.
The legacy canvas has problems with wxWidgets 3.0 built with GTK3, this combination is usually called wxGTK on various package distributions. Don’t be confused when you see wxGTK 3.0.0 in your package manager, this is usually referring to the wxWidgets version, and not whether or not it is built against GTK3.
It has been seen that Fedora 20, 21 and 22, builds against GTK3. The problem manifests in eeschema with slow zooming, and the graphics are not quite exact (try looking at the grid dots). And in pcbnew, the canvas does not really draw properly at all.
On newer fedora builds they ship a wxwidgets compatability package, it is called wxGTK in contrast to wxGTK3 which uses GTK3. The same applies for archlinux, there you need the package wxgtk2. The packages can coexist.
There are a few older cards that seem to not behave properly with the OpenGL canvas used in the new GAL canvas. The list below includes the faulty cards identified thus far:
Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 4500M / Windows 7 64bit / crash on startup (https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1473786)
ATI Hawaii XT [Radeon R9 290X] + 4K display + fglrx driver / Ubuntu 14.04 LTS / flashes when the rendering area is too big (https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1492117)
ATI RV370 [Radeon X300 SE] + radeon driver / Xubuntu 14.04.1 / does not display line rounded line ends (https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1498970)
There have previously been problems with bugs in the boost libraries. A minimum version of boost 1.56 is currently required as it has fixes the majority of bugs previously encountered.
Some users with Radeon graphics have been experiencing problems with
slow rendering in gerbview and eeschema.
Some
bugs have been opened related to Radeon cards.
The solution seems to be require changing an Xorg setting which is either Option "EXAPixmaps" "off" or Option "ShadowPrimary" (see the bug reports for details).
Some users with Intel HD Graphics are having rendering problems with the legacy canvas (and eeschema). It has been reported on at least a laptop with a Intel Pentium P6000 processor and integrated graphics.
A solution is to configure Xorg. Create a Xorg configuration file
/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf, with the follow
information:
Section "Device" Identifier "Intel Graphics" Driver "intel" EndSection
Version 3.0.1 of wxWidgets for Linux (with GTK) can crash when running DRC. This is an issue not seen in wxGTK 3.0.2, so it seems to be fixed upstream. More details can be found in Bug# 1442909.
It is known that KiCad does not work well under Wayland, see this bug Bug# 1725920. Feel free to give useful input to mitigate this issue. It is not yet known if it is a bug in KiCad, WxWidgets or Wayland.
The Modern Toolset (Accelerated) mode in PcbNew and GerbView does not work in Wayland at the moment, and attempting to enable accelerated graphics on a system using Wayland may result in a crash. Until this issue with wxWidgets is resolved, users who use Wayland are advised to select Modern Toolset (Fallback) in the preferences menu.
This affects recent desktops that have started to default to Wayland as their desktop e.g. Ubuntu 17.10. A workaround is to choose X11 when logging in to the desktop.
Mirror printing can be broken because of a bug in wxWidgets version 3.0.2, see Bug# 1463406.
On 64-bit Windows, KiCad’s usage of the boost context library is currently broken due to changes in the library. This causes pcbnew to crash on start. The only workaround is to use boost 1.56 or 1.57 which are known to work.