Celestia Forums

Hi there,
I've just installed my first linux (Linux Mint 7 gnome) on my really old laptop (emachines m5116 - 750mb - intel extreme2 gfx).
The program boots up fine, the spash animation starts from Sol, zooms out tracks towards earth and then the program quits.
I've installed every version of celestia on sourceforge and the same thing happens. Might anyone have any idea what I can do? I know celestia used to run fine when I had xp and I'm not having issues with any other linux software.
thanks

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Hi, sorry for not getting back sooner. I've installed a couple of different linux distros since, much to the same outcome.
the info I get back regarding the graphics is:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device (rev 01)

thanks

So I figured I can press escape during the intro animation to halt it. from there I can use the program and it's great. Except I can't go near Earth. All other planets are fine.

Might anyone know if I can change anything with the earth model that may fix this?

regards
rob

You should probably post your system specs. What cpu, ram, video card, driver, etc. Then it will be easier to give advise.
You also state that you can press esc and get it to run. While it is running, click on Help->OpenGL info. A window will open. Try posting that info here.

Also, try stating from a terminal. If Celestia is in a known path, like /home/chontler/bin or usr/local/bin, you should be able to open a terminal and type "celestia". Then let it run and crash. There should be some terminal output telling you why it crashed.
cartrite

Sorry, I didn't see you posted some info about your machine already. This sounds like your laptop may be able to only render 1 texture simultaneously. The earth texture has a specular texture in the alpha channel.
cartrite

When you look at Help -> OpenGL info, you should see something like this:
If Max simultaneous textures: 1 is shown on your laptop, this may be the reason for the crash. If so, try to update your graphic drivers. This may help. But if it doesn't, you can try this.
Do you have the gimp installed?
If so, copy earth.png to a work folder. Create a folders called work/medres and work/lores in your home directory and copy textures/medres/earth.png to work/medres and textures/lowres/earth.png. Then open work/medres/earth.png with the gimp. The image window should have a tab for Colors -> Components -> Decompose. Click on Decompose and a window will open. This window will probably say "Color Model" RGB and have a check mark in "Decompose to layers". Click OK. Then you will see a new image. This image will be a grayscale 3 layer image. On this new image, click on Colors -> Components -> Compose. On the Compose window, be sure it says Compose to RGB. Click OK. Then you should see a color image of the earth. Save the file rgb compose as earh.png. Then place this new file in textures/medres. You probably want to rename the original earth.png so it will not be overwritten. Then repeat this for the textures/lores/earth.png.
Here are some screenshots of the steps to use with the Gimp.




cartrite

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wow thanks for all the assistance here. I'm quite overwhelmed you went to that much trouble. So I went through all these, learnt a few gimp tricks on the way, but still no joy. keeps crashing as soon as earth comes into view.
the Open GL info says:
Vendor: Tungsten Graphics Inc
Renderer: Mesa DRI Intel(R) 852GM/855GM GEM 20090326 2009Q1 RC2 x86/MMX/SSE2
Version: 1.3 Mesa 7.4
Max simultaneous textures: 4
Max texture size: 2048

Hoorah! So I messed around with files and it was definitely the medres/earth.png that was a problem. so I loaded it into gimp and halved the image size and that fixed it. I'm guessing it may have been a max texture size. thanks for all your help john and cartrite.

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