Celestia Forums

Not sure where to post this, but I use Celestia in the classroom all the time and I am changing over to a Google Chromebook shortly. Is Celestia going to be ported to Chrome OS? Seems logical and fairly easy as their is already a Linux version.

My impression is that Chrome essentially expects its apps to be running "in the cloud", not on the local computer. Unfortunately, I fear that making Celestia into a Web app would be a major undertaking. Linux uses X for its user interface, which is quite different.

The next major release of Celestia probably will use Qt4 to provide a uniform interface for Windows, MacOS and Linux. If one can actually run programs locally under Chrome, then it might be possible, assuming someone has already implemented an appropriate Qt interface.

p.s. maybe they have. See http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2010/06/25/qt- ... t-preview/
although that's a year old. I don't see any updates.

p.p.s. Celestia does depend on the system supporting OpenGL for its 3D graphics. Is that available?

My best information indicates that Open GL will be supported. I am running the CR-48 prototype right now so probably not the best specced machine, however, that's what I have heard. It would be a great shame to lose Celestia. There is no danger of Google letting you run it locally as this is the first step in a drive to dump everything in the cloud. There is a planetarium available free in the Chrome store but it is a pale imitation of what Celestia can do.

Unfortunately, to the extent that Celestia is a realtime 3D application, you really don't want to be running it on a remote server in some kind of client-server mode. Lag alone will destroy the experience, as will trying to run many instances on a server simultaneously. It's easy for Celestia to saturate all of the CPU, graphics and disk i/o cycles available to it.

Having to download the entire app and database every time you run it is also a non-starter. (pun intended). It's just too large, and the current design of Celestia does not lend itself to local caching. A total redesign probably would be needed.


p.s. A quick perusal of Google's ChromeOS pages reveals that a "packaged app" must be contained in a Zip file no larger than 10MB -- presumably to limit download time. That's a constraint that would be difficult to shoehorn a substantial program into However, I think that implies that one can write apps that reside permanently on the user's hardware and don't always have to be downloaded from the cloud.

Chrome OS is basically a Linux distribution with some heavy remodelling in the user space libraries.

You could maybe make a dual-boot with ubuntu or some other distribution and run Celestia from the non-Chrome OS one.

--- edit ---

celestia is free public license software and chrome freeware web browser both are of portable versions,

Celestia is available for AmigaOS 4, Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows,

Chorme is available in Linux, OS X, iOS and Android

NASA and ESA have used Celestia in their educations and To outreach programs and interfacing to trajectory analysis software.

What Educational Activities can be performed with celestia?

The Educational Activities all use/require their own variant of Celestia.

See http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/educational.php

hello!

Chrome OS is basically a Linux distribution with some heavy remodelling in the user space libraries.

You could maybe make a dual-boot with ubuntu or some other distribution and run Celestia from the non-Chrome OS one.

regards,

The best thing to do is to keep PCs or Macbooks around in order to use Celestia rather then trying to use Chrome books.

As of Chrome 69 you are suppressed to be able to run linux programs.

This as per

https://www.howtogeek.com/363331/how-to-set-up-and-use-linux-apps-on-chrome-os/

Which should cover any questions.


Janus.