PIC programming using Ubuntu

PIKLAB

MPLAB is the IDE from Microchip who is the manufacturer of PIC microcontrollers. Problem with MPLab is that it is for windows.

For those who what to work on PIC from linux can think of using PIKLab. PIKLab expect the KDE environment. So if you are using GNOME environment you need to download kde libraries before installing PIKLab. I am using UBUNTU and UBUNTU is having GNOME as the default desktop environment.

KDE is written on Qt and GNONE on GTK+. So PIKLab is having a dependancy on Qt libraries as well.

Prerequisits
Installing Qt libraries in Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install libqt3-mt

Installing KDE libraries in Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install kdelibs
sudo apt-get install kdelibs4c2a
sudo apt-get install kdelibs-data

Install PIKLAB

Once Qt and KDE libraries were install you can install PIKLab. rpm package for PIKLab can be downloaded from the following link.
PIKLab rpm

In ubuntu you need a deb package to install. So you need to convert rmp to deb using alien.

Install alien if it is not present
sudo apt-get install alien

Generate deb from rpm
sudo alien piklab-0.3.2-1mdk.i586.rpm

Install piklab
sudo dpkg -i piklab_0.3.2-2_i386.deb

Resolving undefined symbols
After installing if you try to run piklab it may give some error because of some undefined symbols. In order to resolve this you need to create links to the expected libraries in the name piklab expects.

sudo apt-get install gputils libpcre3
sudo ln libpcreposix.so.3.12.1 libpcreposix.so.0
sudo ln libpcre.so.3.12.1 libpcre.so.0
sudo ln -s libpng12.so.0.27.0 libpng.so.3
sudo ln libexpat.so.1.5.2 libexpat.so.0

Now you can run piklab.