So after downloading the huge amount of data from Astrometry.net, I have archived those files to put on other machines.
I have had some success just pointing Ekos to those files in the Options > Configure Kstars > Index Files window.
However, this isn't working for all of them.
Is there a way to force Ekos to see the files are already there?
So yes you should be able to add new index files locations in the astrometry options in Ekos. As long as the folders are visible on the current computer you are on, that should work. I have even selected files/folders on the network before.
The files I am having trouble with are the
index-4200-*.fits
index-5200-*.fits
These are both 13.6GB
So these were directly downloaded from Astrometry.net but are not accepted by Kstars.
They are also executable, although I don't know what to do with that.
This makes me think there must be some kind of processing done by Kstars when it does the downloading.
I have had success with files downloaded in Kstars and moved to other installations, but not the directly downloaded.
The reason to download directly is because I got an error when trying to download from within Kstars.
I am not sure this particular feature would be in the logs but I will look.
So when KStars downloads index files, they are just fits files in a folder. It doesn't do any extra processing to them. You should have files like index-4200-01.fits index-4200-02.fits in your folder. KStars will simply check the folders you tell it to search and checks off the file sets it finds in the index file downloader tab. One issue might be that that particular file set is pretty large and you should make sure they downloaded properly, but that wouldn't affect whether they get checked off in the index file downloader in KStars because that is just based on the file names found in the folder.
Thank you for the replies! I don't know if I ever mentioned this was on linux.
I went ahead and re-downloaded the files after I first posted this.
However, today again I was copying the Astrometry files to a usb disk and came across the reason I was having trouble.
It seems the cp command, or at least how I did it, copied incomplete files. Therefore, they were not recognized by Ekos.
I tried rsync -qr src/ dest/ which picked up the missing pieces and properly copied the files over. Rsync is a much better tool!