How to install Openscad in Ubuntu 18.04/18.10?

There is no current release of this source package in 18.04 (Bionic Beaver). However, openscad-mcad exists, which depends on openscad, so that's obviously an error.

Solution 1:

It seems openscad is neither in 18.04 nor in 18.10, I just opened a bug here, feel free to subscribe to it.

In the meantime, here is a procedure to install openscad from the PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:openscad/releases
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install openscad

Solution 2:

In Ubuntu 18.10

For this Ubuntu release, OpenSCAD is neither in the official repos nor in the ppa:openscad/releases PPA (see?). Installing the nightly build as a Snap package is a viable short-term alternative:

sudo snap install openscad-nightly

Using libraries in the OpenSCAD Snap: Like any OpenSCAD installation, it comes with one bundled library of CAD functions that you can use out of the box. You would use include <….scad> statements with paths relative to the installation library location, which is here:

/snap/openscad-nightly/current/usr/share/openscad-nightly/libraries/

Since this is only meant for libraries bundled with OpenSCAD and Snap installation directories are not writable anyway, you would install other libraries manually into the built-in library location, which for the Snap package is this:

$HOME/snap/openscad-nightly/current/.local/share/OpenSCAD/libraries

You can also set a "nicer" user-defined library location via $OPENSCADPATH.

In Ubuntu 19.04

The good news is that starting with this Ubuntu release, the brand new version OpenSCAD 2019.01~RC2-2 will be in the official Ubuntu repositories (see). Then, installation will be easy and disk space saving again: