Celestia Forums

Hi folks,

instead of asking silly questions about binary stars I should do something useful... here's my installation report of Celestia.

Due to its excellent performance, I some weeks ago I decided to have a permanent installation of the new KNOPPIX 3.7 (Debian based Linux) on my hard disk replacing my old Linux distribution. This meant I had a chance to replace the old Ssystem 1.6 (may it rest in peace) by Celestia.

Good news: everything required (libpng, libjpeg etc) already is installed with K 3.7 --
Bad news: Celestia does not find the qt library without some additional work.

For the following, you should be logged in as "root". CAUTION: there is no kidding around when logged in as root. Any error could seriously damage your system. Perform the described steps only if you have fully understood what's going on!!! I give NO warranties for anything!!!!

1.) Open a browser window and go to /usr/share/qt3/ , you will see some directorys like "plugin", "include" and so on in here. Open a second browser window and go to /usr/lib/qt3/ , there is only "plugin" present.

2.) Make linked copies of everything found in /usr/share/qt3 to /usr/lib/qt3 EXCEPT "plugins" - it's already there. Under no circumstancens you may overwrite "plugins"!!!!!

3.) Look at both directories /usr/lib/qt3 and /usr/share/qt3 , they should have the same contents now.

4.) Now comes the easy part. Download Celestia's .tar.gz and unpack it to some scratch directory. (I use /root/tmp for such work.) Start a shell and change to that scratch directory.

5.) Type the magic installation formula which should now work without errors:
./configure --with-kde
make
make install

6.) Have a cup of coffee while the compiler produces lots of output. It takes some time.

7.) Type "celestia" to see if all is ok -- space is opened!

8.) Log out as root, log in with your favourite user account and create a Celestia icon at the desktop.

9.) HAVE FUN!

Performance: I did't expect too much because I did the installation at a 4 years old notebook computer. Hardware is PIII-650, 128MB RAM, Graphics: 1024x768 XGA TFT driven by an ATI Rage Mobility with only 4MB RAM (that's the bottle-neck).
Nevertheless, Celestia does a fine job. Out in space, all motions perform surprisingly smooth. Just when I come close to any textured object the graphics slow down. Landing on earth is the border - performance goes down to approx 1 fps. And galaxies are definitely not for me .
However, Celestia is a wonderful tool. Ssystem did not a much faster job before, and it had orders of magnitude less features.

Greetings from outer space, ~Medusa.

P.S. For the Castor fans out there, I fizzeled together all 5 companions last night..., post it elsewhere.

Hum, sorry for bringing back this 'old' topic, but I was 'absent' for several weeks - too busy...

For the following, you should be logged in as "root". CAUTION: there is no kidding around when logged in as root. Any error could seriously damage your system. Perform the described steps only if you have fully understood what's going on!!! I give NO warranties for anything!!!!

For reassuring scared Windows users, Linux is as dangerous working as root as Windows being used as Administrator. The problem is that in Linux you have very powerful commands, and one misplaced 'rm -rf' could wipe all your system (almost happened me once, deleting the 'bin' folder). So you must be careful with certain commands - but just as careful as to using a menu that enables you to format the drive with a simple click. OTOH, breaking a link or deleting a library often is just the same as deleting a Windows 'DLL' (and just as annoying sometimes).

So, the advice would be better: don't work in privileged mode (root, Administrator or the like) unless you really need it!!

Oh yes, I know this thread is intended only for Linux users, but someone interested in give Linux a try would be driven away screaming, with these 'encouraging' phrases...

This -often neglected- advice reminds me of a old story from my work back in the old times of Win98. A customer of mine had a new employee (let's call him Steve) who inherited a computer of a former worker. Willfully he started to clean it of 'old' information. So, he created three folders: 'Steve data', 'Steve Documents', and 'Other'. Next he moved all of the previous folders (including that strange one called 'windows') to the 'Other' folder. He was -of course- outraged at that silly computer when it failed to start next day. You can imagine the face of my co-worker when he reviewed the 'broken' computer (and the laughs back at my office).

Hey everybody,

Using Knoppix hd-installed (debian), followed these instructions exactly. ./configure goes through perfectly, but when I run make, I get a series of errors:



I've also tried using the --with-qt-dir parameter, but it does the same thing. Any suggestions?

Thaks!
Ben