How to run CELX scripts

[tarazed]

Another newbie question. I am a bit confused by some of the
documentation on scripting. Trying to run a .celx script, e.g.

celestia scripts/HuygensMissionTour.celx

but this returns an error about a malformed script, missing the
initial parenthesis {. So it looks as if lua scripts cannot be
executed directly. Do they need some sort of wrapper, like a Celestia
script to invoke them?

It also looks as if the note about scripts residing anywhere for
Celestia versions greater than 1.3 is not correct. I had to specify
the subdirectory. Maybe path searching has to be assisted by the
user; an environment variable perhaps?

Any enlightenment would be appreciated.

--------------------------------------
AMD Opteron, 2Gb, GeForce 7800 GT
Mandriva Linux 2007.0, GNOME
Celestia 1.4.1

[selden]

if .celx is not recognized, then the copy of Celestia that you have installed does not include Lua. Including Lua is a compile-time option. You'll have to locate a copy which was built including Lua, or build such a copy yourself.

[tarazed]

Thanks selden for the explanation. So I installed lua and lua-devel and
downloaded the celestia source package from the University of Kent.

Problem with configure - ran into trouble with all the guis except
GLUT. Could not determine if it was a path problem or library
mismatches.

Compiled with g++ which raised errors on a couple of header files,
which I fixed. However the compiler became totally confused by
celx.cpp, generating error messages which I could not interpret, as if
there were missing delimiters somewhere. The first error contained a
reference which did not exist in the text of the file. No more time
to investigate this so will have to wait to see if Mandriva 2008
builds Lua support into Celestia. If not a bit of arm twisting would
be in order.

The only binary package I could find elsewhere was x86 - I need 64bit.

The above remarks should perhaps be addressed to another forum - must
look around here.

[selden]

You might consider starting from the official v1.4.1 (or later) source files on SourceForge rather than ones with unknown patches applied by who-knows-whom. If you're having to fix bugs in the source, then those fixes really should be contributed to the official distribution so others don't have to reinvent the wheel when the next official release becomes available.

There are quite a few threads here discussing some of the problems compiling for various Linux distributions. Using the forum's Search feature probably would be best.