How to install LibreCAD on Rocky 8.6?

Please, does anyone have experience with this? It doesn’t exist any package in EPEL 8, but only “librecad-2.2.0-0.13.rc3.el7.x86_64.rpm”. Thanks

Can you explain what it is, and what it does?

Hi @norrsken and welcome to the RockyLinux forum.

It indeed looks like there is no “compatible” binary package around for LibreCAD for anything post-EL7
Also, snapcraft and flathub do not provide LibreCAD at all.

That being said, the only way to work around is building it from source as described at…:
https://wiki.librecad.org/index.php?title=Build_from_source

Keeping fingers crossed, cheers, Thomas

Just to kill some time I’ve rebuilt what is currently in fedora rawhide without any changes:

https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/mlampe/librecad/

You could give it a try.

1 Like

Hi chemal, you’re very kind :smiley_cat:, please give me some time to try it out, maybe next week. Thanks!

You might try QCAD community edition, which is similar to Librecad. You would have to download the QCAD Professional version and follow the instructions to remove the paid plugins. I am using the paid version, which costs $39 a year after the first payment, I think $55. It works very well as an AutoCAD LT substitute and you are allowed to use it on several computers, including for commercial work. If you choose to install the community addition you will have to work in dxf like librecad. It installs into the opt directory in your home folder if you run the install file from the Downloads folder. cd to the Downloads folder, make the install file executable, then run by typing ./qcad-3.27.6-pro-linux-x86_64.run.

https://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=librecad

Hi @Eldes ,

You’re right, but… I checked rmpfind.net and pkgs.org, flathub and snapcraft.
What your link reveals is sadly exactly the same status quo that @norrsken complained about:
There’s no packages for anything newer than EL7.

(And neither the provided Fedora nor OpenSUSE flavours are installable)

Besides the great job done by @chemal , I today stumbled across this:

This turns arch packages into AppImage “packages”.
Might be worth giving a try to people who are afraid/new to (re)building stuff. Like me. :slight_smile:

Perfect work by Chemal :grinning:. How simple is it now!

# dnf copr enable mlampe/librecad
# dnf install librecad

That’s all.
There is only one problem that this LibreCAD doesn’t include language packs (I need Czech and Swedish). I need to find out how to solve it.

Thanks gfneal, but… IMO the paid program does’nt have its charm for linux and QCAD Community Edition is so stripped down that it can’t be used for basic a little serious work in 2D CAD.

Hi chemal, please, could I ask you to rebuild some stable version, for example Librecad 2.2.0-rc4? There is v2.2.0-alpha without language pack in your repository. Thank you very much.

This is rc3, not some alpha. Language pack is included. There is however an open bug:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2089001

Until this is fixed, you can workaround the problem by starting the program with its full path: type /usr/bin/librecad in a terminal window. If you want to start from the applications menu of your DE, you need to edit /usr/share/applications/librecad.desktop. Edit the line Exec=librecad %F to contain the full path.

Thanks so much, chemal, the language pack works well now. However, I see constantly “Version: 2.2.0-alpha” in Help | About menu.

And while we’re at it: there is another open bug at

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2126705

A workaround for not finding the plugins is a symlink form /usr/share/librecad/plugins to /usr/lib64/librecad/plugins.

So I’ve tried it without the mentioned fix. Plugins don’t really work. But the vertical line was drawn correctly for me.
I’ve found a fully functional v2.2.0-rc4 as an AppImage:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/librecad/

Meanwhile fedora has updated to 2.2.0-rc4 and fixed the open bugs. I’ve added this to my copr and it looks good to me.

Chemal is obviously the Absolute Number One :+1:
His Librecad really works.