documentation of Linux installation is incomplete

[Jabberwocky]

Hi,

I just tried to install Celestia on my Linux system as described on https://celestia.space/deb.html as follows:

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(ins) 14:21:38 ~ $ curl -s https://celestia.space/packages/celestia.key | sudo apt-key add -
[sudo] password for stefan:             
OK
(ins) 13:04:59 ~ $ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID:   Zorin
Description:   Zorin OS 16
Release:   16
Codename:   focal
(ins) 13:05:13 ~ $ echo deb https://celestia.space/packages focal main | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/celestia.list
deb https://celestia.space/packages focal main
(ins) 13:06:25 ~ $ cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/celestia.list
deb https://celestia.space/packages focal main
(ins) 13:06:40 ~ $ sudo apt install celestia
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Package celestia is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

E: Package 'celestia' has no installation candidate


I am submitting this as a bug in the documentation at https://celestia.space/deb.html. There is probably a way to install Celestia on my system, but if I strictly follow the documentation, it does not work. Also, the last step

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sudo apt install celestia

is missing from the documentation page, even though the title is 'Celestia installation'. Maybe this is even the only problem and the package name is not really 'celestia'.

As a side note, before using the official way to install Celestia as documented on https://celestia.space/deb.html, I simply tried to use Zorin's package manager which uses the snap package. That didn't work either, because after startup the message 'Cannot read star database.' appears, while the splash screen says 'Loading data files: data/stars.dat'. But this is just a side note, because according to https://celestia.space/deb.html this is not the official way to install Celestia anyway.

Thank you
Stefan

[chandra]

I don't know much about deb, but if all else fails, you can try the AppImages.
With this it is even possible to have versions 1.6 and 1.7 in parallel.

AppImage, first attempts - a small tutorial
https://github.com/CelestiaProject/Celestia/issues/333

[Jabberwocky]

Thank you. I'm sure I can somehow manage to get celestia running on my system, for example I could download the missing stars.dat file.

I wrote this bug report not so much to get help, but more to point out the bug in the documentation at https://celestia.space/deb.html. First, it doesn't work that way at least on my system, second, even the actual installation instruction "sudo apt install celestia" is missing.

[SevenSpheres]

You can make a pull request to https://github.com/CelestiaProject/www to fix this.

[onetwothree]

No need for pull requests. Debian and derivated OS users must know that "apt update" is required on repository addition.