PICKitPlus now runs on Linux – The software that uses the Microchip PK2 and PK3 to program new and legacy microcontrollers from Microchip.

26 October, 2020

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We are very pleased to announce the release of the Linux version of PKCMD: PKCMD-LX. This is the Personal Computer version, designed to run on flavours of Linux, both 32 and 64 bit. This was a huge investment by us. But, these are exciting developments for the software as it shows what can be with the PK2 and PK3 programmers!

PKCMD-LX can be used for reading and writing Microchip’s PIC range of microcontrollers, using the Pickit 2 or Pickit 3 device programmers. PKCMD-LX provides the best experience for the Linux user, developers and the professional developer community, and as a command-line utility is can be easily integrated into users scripts.

Distribution

PKCMD-LX is distributed as an AppImage. Using an AppImage enables the development team to provide native binaries for Linux users the same way we do for other operating systems. An AppImage enables the development team to package the PKCMD-LX application for common Linux operating systems, e.g., Ubuntu, Debian, openSUSE, RHEL, CentOS, Fedora etc.

The PICKitPlus AppImage comes with all dependencies that cannot be assumed to be part of each target system and will run on most Linux distributions without modifications.

Almost all major distributions are compatible with AppImages, without requiring the user to make modifications to the base system. AppImages are portable. Users can place the AppImage on a USB flash drive and run it from there, on any machine, as the users wish.

Supported Linux Distributions

Distributions known to be compatible version require libc, and these include:

Arch 2011.08.19
CentOS 7.8.2003 (released in 2020)
Debian 7 (Wheezy)
Fedora 15 (Lovelock)
Gentoo 11.2
Mint 11 (Katya)
openSUSE 12.1
Slackware 13.37
Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty)

Distributions that do not use libc (such as Abyss, Alpine, Sabotage, Vanilla and Void) will not run PKCMD-LX.

Free Compatibility-test Program

A compatibility-test program is available free of charge on our website: Download our free download to see if the full product is compatible with the target computer and Operating System: http://www.pickitplus.co.uk/distros/open/pkcmd-lx-compatibility-test.tar.gz