colleagues, is ubuntu 22 lts ok to go with openlane, sky130 pdk and all tools for analog? I'm on mac m1 and it is giving me hard times, so thinking of vmware ubuntu 22. but having experience with ROS1 which is good on ubuntu 20 and not ok with 22, I just want to make sure that 22LTS is not 'too recent' to run all toolchain and editor tools for schematics

I don't think my tools (magic, netgen, open_pdks) are going to give you any issues. Xschem and ngspice should be good, too; none of the foregoing uses anything but well-established dependencies. I can't speak for klayout, Xyce, or OpenROAD. I do, however, have a set of instructions for installing everything under Mac OS. Have you seen it? The location is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QXi2kqWgQ8JR_BJCfUgFkQCSSxetXcnWrDHRJdLBsy0/edit. In particular, see Appendix 3. Also check out JKU-IIC tools at https://github.com/iic-jku/IIC-OSIC-TOOLS.

Wow, that's a treasure I've been looking for. Thank you! Will proceed according to it.

@Tim Edwards This is excellent link providing one stop access to everything related to pdk and tool installations. I am using custom installed open-pdk and tools. Would like to understand how does docker based solutions differ: 1. Does installing volare provides access to EDA tools also? How to update open_pdk/tools in volare? 2. What happens to custom pdk and tools installed on my existing Ubuntu setup? Can there be any conflict caused between custom installed pdk/tools and those through volare? 3. Which is the advisable route to complete designs for chipignite tapeouts ?

I think volare only installs the PDKs, not the tools. The IIC-JKU docker solution includes all the tools. Volare is generally managed between Donn and me, meaning that when I have an important update I let Donn know and he updates volare. I don't use the docker solutions myself, so I'm not knowledgeable about how the docker tools might (or might not) interact with existing tools installed in the OS. I generally would advise compiling and installing all tools from source, but that can be difficult (and gets especially difficult outside of an Ubuntu or CentOS type Linux environment). Docker is a quick solution.

I am little confused. I have used tools and pdks installed from source but steps in this video shows step to install tools and pdk with local caravel repo. Most probably it is using volare. Any specific recommendations on which flow to use for tools and pdk setup ? In case of tools and pdk installed from source, what are the steps to update individual tools and open_pdks to latest versions ?