Celestia Forums

Hey all,

I am thinking about building a linux box and just wanted to get a feel for what Celestians are using as far as linux builds go. I know SUSE is popular, but I was thinking on UBUNTU and wondered if there was any insight. This would not be my first linux box, but I am not overly skilled as a programmer either... there would be a learning curve (which I am not afraid of).

Ubuntu is the most popular on DistroWatch these days, but OpenSUSE is a close second. Both are very good distributions, you shouldn't have any problem with either of them.

Sadly they both provide outdated versions of Celestia (1.3.2), so you'll have to get it from a third party or build it yourself...

From what I've seen here, building it myself on linux shouldn't be the end of the world...

Merci, Christophe.

Christophe wrote:Ubuntu is the most popular on DistroWatch these days, but OpenSUSE is a close second. Both are very good distributions, you shouldn't have any problem with either of them.

Sadly they both provide outdated versions of Celestia (1.3.2), so you'll have to get it from a third party or build it yourself...

I operate somewhere between OpenSuSE 10.1 and 10.3. A big improvement jump definitely happened between SuSE 9.x and OpenSuSE 10.x. I am of course not interested in 'ease of operation' type of arguments. I rather value reliability, advanced driver implementation and good updating strategies.

Yast2-updating remains a pain and the implemented media part in 10.1 was a joke. The first thing to do is to install 'smart-0.5x' and a host of reliable updating channels. Smart works VERY well, indeed.
For about one week, I have been working with/exploring the latest 'beagle desktop indexing tool' (beagle-0.2.16-5 + mono 1.2.3 + gtk-sharp2-2.8.3 + ...) with quite mixed conclusions. Just wrote a corresponding mail to the maintainer Joe Shaw yesterday...

The saying is that since the introduction of OpenSuSE, the idea was to reduce systematically the number of patches to the kernel etc., which I would most welcome. I noticed that compiling non-SuSE sources and also of src.rpm's from >10.1 works much smoother now, i.e. with less required manual interference/repair/adaptation work.

My understanding was that Ubuntu caters mainly also for Linux /Newbies/. SuSE/Novel has a substantial commercial/professional 'backup' in their staff (and their philosophy) . I don't know what this is worth, though.

Bye Fridger