Celestia Forums

I've noticed a trend in the high schools I have taught in. We have current laptops (bless our technology folks) but aren't allowed to install programs because they are "unsupported" or somesuch. This includes Celestia.

Only Acrobat and M$ products are supported. Not even the yearbook software is allowed to be installed.

That rant over, I have to think that there are others like me out there. Portable Celestia 1.5.1 is a godsend for these situations. My tech rep at the school knows all about it and gives it her blessing, we just cannot install to the hard drive of the computers. Instead, the students run off of a flash drive.

As such, the educational version will not work for me, so I've been reworking the activities for what I need in my classroom (high school, general Earth Science) with updated CEL-URLs that will work with the portable version.

I would like to make them available as I complete them. Very few of the words are my own. I have merely selectively chosen from those in the regular activities. I did, however, update the CEL-URLs as I said.

Though to save me the work, I would love, love, LURVE, if someone portable-ed the Educational Celestia so that I can use it.

I've attached the one activity I have written. May it be of use to others. My students are generally behavior problems who are repeating at least one class. General Earth Science is the dumping grounds for such students since we do not have an accountability test at the end of the course. Don't get me started on that. As such, I have them periodically write on a data sheet for no other purpose than to know that they are in fact on task.

The file sheet is designed to be open in a document program that takes up only part of the screen, next to Portable Celestia 1.5.1 in windowed mode. That helps my students in their switching-back-and-forth thing. The data sheet, I print.

Files @ http://drop.io/wkxspvw

theinfamousj wrote: I've noticed a trend in the high schools I have taught in. We have current laptops (bless our technology folks) but aren't allowed to install programs because they are "unsupported" or somesuch. This includes Celestia.

Sadly, in an environment of inadequate budgets and understaffed support organizations, this seems to be the only viable solution. Recovering a system from a failed install can be very time consuming. It's a waste of effort to try to answer questions about why unfamiliar software doesn't work as expected. Commercial software is expensive, but installing unlicensed software is a very serious legal liability which schools simply cannot afford. As a result, they have to implement restricted software and hardware configurations which can be easily supported by minimal technical staff.

theinfamousj wrote:the students run off of a flash drive.

I hope you are aware of that malware infections propagate by the exchange of USB thumb drives in addition to all of the better known vectors. The anti-virus vendors are only just now coming out with minimal detection methods and incomplete removal techniques. Cornell University is in the process of a major cleanup despite the use of anti-viral software.
http://www.cit.cornell.edu/security/alerts/usb-bot/ includes free downloads to help protect against this.

At the moment, other than a clean reinstall from a known good disk image, the best way to clean a system is to use BitDefender, a Linux variant running from CD. Since it has full access to the Windows system disk, it can find problems which are hidden when Windows is running. It's a free download from their site. The same ISO CD image is available from the Cornell page, too.

I would love, love, LURVE, if someone portable-ed the Educational Celestia so that I can use it.

Hopefully Frank Gregorio can address your issues with running the EDU version of Celestia in a portable environment.

However, to first approximation, it should only require installing the Edu version and all of its addons in the normal way onto a system which permits that (maybe your home system, for example) and then copying Celestia's entire directory tree to a thumb drive. Celestia determines what directory it was run from. It doesn't care where it is. URLs and scripts work as they should if you drag them onto Celestia's icon.

I hope this helps a little.

Hi:

Hopefully Frank Gregorio can address your issues with running the EDU version of Celestia in a portable environment

I was unaware of the existence of Portable applications until now. It does seem suited for running Celestia educational activities in schools that cannot install hard copy. However, in addition to Selden's points about the insecurity of flash drives, there are several key things to understand that may limit how useful portable apps will be with Celestia-ED. Specifically:

1. Most of the educational activities use a LOT of add-ons to take students to over 300 destinations. They require LOTS of video RAM and a good openGL video card. Whenever I have tried to run the educational activities on a laptop, particularly one available in a high school, the laptop's video card (usually integrated) simply wasn't up to it. The frame rates dropped to 1 fps or less, in many of the scenes. For example, the activities use high resolution textures of Earth (main texture, normal map, spec map, night map, cloud map), plus high res moon textures. A laptop locks up when trying to view Earth and moon in the same screen. As such, the only way to use a laptop with the Activities would be to design a completely new set of textures and add-ons that limit the demands on the system. This can be done but would take a lot of time!!!

2. I am not familiar with how portable apps work. The Activity series uses several folders that do not come with the normal Celestia distribution. These includes folders named "educational-extras", "scripts", "multimedia", "sounds", etc. It also uses Windows shortcuts, hyperlinks to special "cel" files inside the Activity document and command line commands to control which add-ons are loaded at one time. I notice that the portable app does contain some of these folders, but I suspect it would take a LONG time to adapt the activities to use the more limited capability of portable app.

Nevertheless ,it is a good idea. Please feel free to adapt one or more of the Activities to a portable app format, using some of the add-ons that come with the Activity.

Thanks for the effort.

Frank