Which Linux distribution works best with Celestia?

[exadvent]

I know that this is like asking what the best flavor of ice cream is, but I would like to get some opinions.

I am currenly using Win XP (see signature for my system) and want to try linux. I have just begun using Celestia 1.4.1 for windows so I am not really familiar with the program. I am interested in 3D modeling of spacecraft and find Celestia a much more interesting enviroment than Sci-Fi games.

From reading the last year of forum posts about linux and Celestia it seems that there is just no easy way to get Celestia to work with linux without a lot of customization because of the different linux distributions. Or without using an old version of Celestia from that distribution's repository.


I was considering Ubuntu linux, but there have been many posts regarding problems with the new version of Celestia.

Does anyone here use Xubuntu which is Ubuntu with the Xfce desktop?

Are there other good, easy and free linux distributions that work well with Celestia?

Or does M$ have me in its power forever

[Christophe]

I personally use Ubuntu. The latest release 6.06 (Dapper Drake) comes with Celestia 1.3.2. So does Suse 10.1. Fedora 5 seems to be the most uptodate with 1.4.1.

Celestia's dependencies are now included in all distributions, so there is no compatibility issue.

Compiling from source using the cvs repository is relatively hassle free, provided you have some experience. If you have no experience, but are willing to learn you'll always find help in the community, here or in your distribution's forums.

Good luck,

[RocketMan@JSC]

I've got it working on Fedora Core 3 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.?. I've only built 1.4.1 with the GTK+ front end, not sure about the KDE version.

If the code is good (which Celestia is), it should just about work on any of them. The biggest question is what level of video driver support is available for the particular Linux version. I'm not sure how transferable the drivers are between the various Linux flavors.

Thus far I've had good luck with Nvidia and the Red Hat Linux. Give the latest Fedora a go--it's free.

[John Van Vliet]

i am using fedora 5 with gnome
celestia will build in both gnome and kde ,but i like gnome best
fedora 5 uses gcc 4.1 so there are 2 files in celengian that nead changing
( search for my past posts to find the changes )
also for fedora there are very well suported video drivers for ati and nivida
they are very easy io install

Code: Select all

     yum install kmod-nivida