Prerequisites

mcltspice drives LTspice through Wine in headless batch mode. You need two things: a working Wine installation and the LTspice application files extracted from the Windows installer.

Install Wine

Arch Linux

sudo pacman -S wine

Debian / Ubuntu

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
sudo apt update
sudo apt install wine64

Fedora

sudo dnf install wine

Verify the installation:

wine --version

Tip

mcltspice uses Wine in batch mode only. No display server or GUI is needed --- it works fine in headless environments, containers, and SSH sessions.

Extract LTspice

LTspice is distributed as a Windows .msi installer. Rather than running it through Wine’s installer, extract the files directly with 7z.

1. Download LTspice

   Get LTspice64.msi from analog.com/ltspice.

2. Extract the MSI

   7z x LTspice64.msi -oltspice
   cd ltspice
   7z x disk1.cab

3. Initialize a Wine prefix

   export WINEPREFIX=$PWD/.wine
   export WINEARCH=win64
   wineboot --init

   This creates a minimal Wine prefix in the same directory. LTspice does not need a full Windows environment --- the prefix just provides the runtime.

Note

You need p7zip (or 7zip) installed to extract the MSI. On Arch: sudo pacman -S p7zip. On Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install p7zip-full.

Set the LTspice directory

mcltspice looks for LTspice in this order:

1. The LTSPICE_DIR environment variable
2. The default path: ~/claude/ltspice/extracted/ltspice

If your extracted files are elsewhere, set the environment variable:

export LTSPICE_DIR=/path/to/your/extracted/ltspice

For persistent configuration, add it to your shell profile (~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, etc.) or pass it through your MCP client configuration.

Tip

The directory should contain the XVIIx64.exe binary and the lib/ folder with component libraries. If you see those files, the extraction worked correctly.

Verify the setup

Once Wine and LTspice are in place, use the check_installation tool to confirm everything is working:

check_installation()

This checks for:

• Wine availability and version
• LTspice binary presence
• Library and symbol directories
• Write permissions for output files

If any check fails, the tool reports exactly what is missing and how to fix it.