getting Celestia on Linux

[Fizz]

Hi all-

I am a long-time Celestia user. I recently made the move from Win10 to Linux (Mint 19.1) and want to get Celestia installed. However, I know squat about package installations. So i am hoping to get some help.

I found this thread which discusses several known issues with the direct download from celestia.space. It seems that is not the one i want. But the thread also indicates there is a working version out there.
viewtopic.php?f=15&t=19750

What should i be downloading and where do i get it? And once i have it, how do i install it?

Thanks for all the help!

-Fizz

[onetwothree]

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curl https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/munix9:/unstable/Debian_10/Release.key | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/munix9:/unstable/Debian_10/ ./" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/celestia-obs.list

sudo apt update && sudo apt install celestia

Afair Mint has 2 flavors: one Debian- and another one Ubunu based. If you use use the Ubuntu-based one then replace Debian_10 with Ubuntu_18.04.

[Fizz]

I have the Ubuntu version. So i have tried this, and the first two lines seem fine. But i get errors when i get to the install line.

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E: Type 'https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/munix9:/unstable/Ubuntu_18.04/' is not known on line 1 in source list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/celestia-obs.list
E: The list of sources could not be read.


So i have no idea what's up. Hopefully you have an idea.

Added after 6 minutes 13 seconds:
Ack- and now another problem. When i go to the system update manager, it's not working any more. It gives the same error and can't refresh with list of updates. How do i undo this?

-Fizz

Added after 16 minutes 20 seconds:
Update 2:

I had to sudo rm the celestia-obs.list file to get the software manager working again. So clearly there is something in that file that is breaking something. Once we figure it out we can try again. Any thoughts?

-Fizz

[onetwothree]

So i have no idea what's up. Hopefully you have an idea.

I had an error in the echo "...", use the following:

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echo "deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/munix9:/unstable/Debian_10/ ./" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/celestia-obs.list


"deb " part was missing.

[Fizz]

Fantastic! With that fix it is installed and running!

Next, i want to bring over all my Celestia add-ons from my Win version and get them integrated. Whereabouts is Celestia installed on the drive? That is- does it have its own installation directory? It looks like /usr/share/ . Is that the only place i need to know about? (Hopefully the file formats for those are all unchanged. Heh.)

Thanks much for your help!

-Fizz

[onetwothree]

Create file ~/.celestia.cfg with the following content:

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Configuration
{
  ExtrasDirectories  [ "extras-standard" "extras" "~/exras" ]
}


Then create folder ~/exras and copy your addons there. Instead of ~/extras you can use any other directory. Of course it's still possible to use /usr/share/celestia/extras but this is less flexible as requires sudo usage.

[Fizz]

Excellent, the extras folder is working perfectly, and all my additions (most notably my own planet) are back. Sweet!

I do see some graphical issues though. Saturn's rings are not rendering correctly- like it's a solid surface, and i don't see any ring shadows even though i have that rendering option enabled. Is that something on my end (need to update my graphics drivers and/or kernel) or is that an issue with Celestia's rendering engine?

-Fizz

[onetwothree]

Please provide screenshots: 1) of Saturn 2) of File->Preferences dialog, Objects tab.

It sound like you are missing a ring texture.

[Fizz]

Yeah a missing texture was one of my thoughts. I have attached the screenshots.

-Fizz

[onetwothree]

Yeah, your texture has disappeared.

What do you have for the following commands:

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ls -l /usr/share/celestia/textures/lores/saturn-rings.png
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2787 Aug  7 18:47 /usr/share/celestia/textures/lores/saturn-rings.png

dpkg -S /usr/share/celestia/textures/lores/saturn-rings.png
celestia-data: /usr/share/celestia/textures/lores/saturn-rings.png

dpkg -L celestia-data | grep -i saturn-rings
/usr/share/celestia/textures/lores/saturn-rings.png


If you don't it for some reasons you can download it from our github repository.

[Fizz]

The output from those commands matches yours exactly (other than the date). So the file is there (and i can see and open it through file manager). But for some reason Celestia is not using it. Hrmmm...

So i tried replacing the file with the one from the repository. I had to use a sudo cp command because i couldn't set the permissions otherwise. But replacing the file hasn't made any difference.

I know rings can work, because i have the add-on for J1407 (giant ringed planet) and it looks fine.

-Fizz

[onetwothree]

Weird. Do you have any errors in a terminal (launch Celestia from a terminal) or when you press ~ and go to saturn (but disable moons and minor moons so we don't have messages about their textures)?

You should have something like that:

rings.png (15.71 KiB) Viewed 8051 times

[Fizz]

Ah, so now i see two errors. Both say there is an error opening an image. They are:

textures/medres/SatRing.png
textures/lores/SatRing.png

It seems to be thinking it should use SatRing.png rather than the saturn-rings.png file.

So i poked around. I have an extra saturn.ssc file floating around that was using a different texture (it indicates it was adding the D-ring). So once i dropped that ssc file and restarted, the correct image was loaded and looks good. Thus, it was my fault- a holdover from my Win version that i totally forgot about.

Thanks for the tip of how to view errors- that got me looking in the right direction.


-Fizz