Celestia Forums

This is not a bug report, but more of a plea for help. (Machine info at end)

Got recent (few days old) CVS version from sourceforge.

Ran autotools (aclocal etc) -- Fine
./configure --with-glut && make etc -- Built and ran fine (Great, in fact)
./configure --with-kde && make etc. -- Built fine, but crashed on start up with a communications failure.

return 0
ERROR - Communications failure with celestia, probably crashed

(or something of that nature)

This suggests that something in my kde install is not linked properly. I am running Mandrake 10.0 Official, with as many devel.rpms installed as possible from this version. The only additional things done to compile it was to remove automake 1.4 in favour of 1.7, and to install freeGLUT.

Have built openGL apps in the recent past, including some nVidia demo's, and my own smoke/liquid simulation. Also, binary openGL apps work (ie ut2004, 2003, wine->Max Payne, openGL screensavers, tuxRacer)

Might download tuxRacer source and have a go at that in the meantime.

I am at work at the moment, so will post more info (ldd, build debug version, etc) when I get home and have another go. Any ideas on what to check would be appreciated.

Ben O'Steen (ben(at)bosteen.uklinux.net - email)
Mandrake 10.0 Official (all core packages unupgraded)
KDE 3.2.2 perhaps, Gnome 2.4, 2.6.7 kernel (vanilla), freeGLUT
nVidia 6106 drivers on FX 5900 128Mb
2600Xp Athlon on nForce2 mobo
512Mb 400MHz Ram

Hi Ben,

A few suggestions:
- Instead of running autotools directly, use make -f Makefile.cvs
- Get liblua5 and liblua5-devel (they are in contrib), and use --with-lua

I usualy build with --prefix=/usr, I'm not sure if that could be the cause of your problem. You have to make sure that KDE_DIRS is set appropriately for celestia to be able to find its data files.

Got the latest snapshot of celestia and built that with --prefix=/usr and SUCCESS!

Thanks! I'm still not sure which part of that helped but thanks for the advice.

I myself haven't had any luck with cvs. So maybe some people might call me stupid. But I don't think it's a wonder that you didn't succeed. Hope it comforts you a bit

You must take into account that there are a lot of different compiler&tool versions around there, and people don't always install all the development environment needed for Celestia. For compiling from source, both in Windows &Linux, you must check first that you meet the requirements, mostly that you have all the libraries needed with the minimal version numbers. Yes, sometimes is tricky, but not impossible if you have enough knowledge to deal with sources. If not, stick to the precompiled binaries.