which indiserver problem exactly?
I'm on Sierra and so far so good, let me know the issue you have and I'll check my notes.

I realized my post wasn't clear and edited it.

When using kstars, trying to start Ekos, I get a dialog that says this:

Unable to find INDI server. Please make sure the package that provides the 'indiserver' binary is installed.

Even though it is in /usr/local/bin

I will ask Jasem. When I installed it, there were a couple of extra items in the right click menu and there was additional stuff in the preferences for xplanet. But all I figured out was how to make a planet the background on my computer's desktop. Thats cool and all I guess, but I don't get why you would want to do that??

Under Data/Download New Data I get the following:
Loading of providers from file: ........ failed


I had that on the VM a long time ago. Cannot remember how if it was fixed or not.

Did you go into the preferences and select the path to the indiserver?

Yes I had this error for the last 2 months until last week when I figured out why it was happening. I don't yet have a good solution yet as to how to fix it, I have the files needed to make it run and I put them in folders, and then I set the paths using export commands before running kstars. I am sure there is a better way, but I'm not there yet.

I've set the path to the binary in the config page. On a planet, I get on rick click: Pring Xplanet view.
Apart from that, it doesn't do much, if I pick To Screen nothing happen and To File, no files are being created.

Had the same issue, see my screenshot (Mac Sierra).
Don't forget to copy the xml files to the right location as in /usr/local/share/indi

To get the download new data working, I had to set two environment variables prior to running Kstars. The first one is the path and it points to a folder that looks like this:



The second is the qt_plugin environment variable and it points to a folder that looks like this:

sorry, I'm not following there. Do you have the terminal commands please?

For to screen, I think it sets your desktop image to whatever the planet is. i thought nothing had happened too, and then I closed kstars and said

export PATH=~/kf/bin
export QT_PLUGIN_PATH=~/kf/lib/plugins

Then start kstars in the terminal

Where those paths point to those two folders. My screenshots show slightly different paths, but that is because I copied those two folders because I discovered they were important! Again these two folders came from the emerge method, I have no idea yet how to get them the other way.