I've read such things as Kstars won't run smoothly on say a 'pi. For something portable that doesn't need mains power / cost of a monitor I don't see that as an option so wondered about using a netbook - intel Atom in other words. I wouldn't be to bothered if the screen was a bit jerky and would just want it to be "usable".

I'd guess any heavy maths would be slow but in the dim and distant past I have used software that has very heavy maths content on PC's without a floating point unit and it wasn't that bad - at times i am into raytracing and telescope design. Seldom simple ones that I could actually make.

I have wondered about so called light desktops but some figures around suggest KDE is pretty good with bells and whistles turned off. I also have no idea if it's even possible to run Kstars etc on other desktops that use Qt?

John
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Who has setup Kstar/Ekos on a RasPI ? I would like to see this
Not saying it's not possible, but .... challenging.
I use(d) the RasPI as an indi server running my observatory, and my Mac (laptop or mini) running the Kstars/Ekos VM to connect to the RasPI.

Jasem is using an Rpi in his last tutorial and it seems to work very well.



In few days, I will receive my RPi2 and try to set up everything with indi

At work I use a HP Mini with a Intel Atom CPU N270@1.60GHz, 2GB RAM to run Ubuntu and Kstars, it is a bit slow but usable.

/Markku

I've got Kstars running on it using OpenSuse 13.2 KDE. It's running smoothly with a bit of cursor flashing on 1GB of ram. It's a HP netbook and so far I haven't managed to get the cover off even following HP's instructions, hence 1GB. The CPU is a 1.6 GHZ Atom dual core by the look of it as it shows 4 cores in Kinfo centre.
I should know what to install on these really but tried both 64 bit and legacy. The legacy is much quicker. Load times are on the slow side but applications so far are pretty usable.

No signs of Ekos though. I have installed the indi library.

Kstars is annoying me a little. I can get a "to the horizon" view zoomed right out but south is at the bottom. I really need it to be at the top as I'm just south of B'ham city centre. No point in looking in that direction. It also doesn't seem to be keen on small wide screen displays but I should be able to cope.

John
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OpenSUSE has been historically bad at packaging KStars. I'll ask Lupinix if he can make kstars-bleeding available for Suse since it's an RPM based distro maybe it won't be too difficult.

For new users, I'd recommend Kubuntu, but anyway let's see if packages for OpenSUSE can be made and hopefully this Linux packaging nightmare will be over at some point.

Thanks if you can. That would be great. I'm very KDE and have use the Suse stable for a very very long time. Some one some where usually maintains most packages on the build search but nothing much came up in this case.

John
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Actually opensuse has kstars5 which is the KDE 5 version available, but this one is also available WITHOUT INDI or Ekos. I will email them to resolve this mess.

Nope, official kstars package in openSUSE is KDE4 based, the kde5 package is just an unofficial one in OBS. I will update my Fedora packages soon and then try to build them on openSUSE 13.2. As INDI is also quite bad maintained there I will also package it then. Packaging in openSUSE, Fedora (and Mageia) is very similar, mostly macros are different, but the really required macros are portable. I just have to check if KF5 stuff in 13.2 is new enough.

I did some digging and it seems that KStars has been broken in OpenSUSE since 2011!! . I just emailed them to fix the issue, but I think there should be something similar to kstars-bleeding available for these distros as well!

It would be too bad if Kstars etc maintained source packages on sourceforge. Trouble with pulling from git is that I can never be sure if the version will suit the KDE I am actually running - KDE 4.14.2 on the netbook on OpenSuse 13.2.

John
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It seems from asking on the OpenSuse forum that Kstars on 13.1 does support INDI and it may be possible to load it on 13.2. The are details in the post on there. A search for kstars ekos should bring it up.

I have found a src rpm for 13.2 and am currently building it. Wont know what I get till it's done but the depend's look promising. Looks like it's a bug fix build. 20mins build time so far ............................. But seems to be doing it on a netbook with little ram.

I would be happy compiling from source but unlike many the kde crowd don't provide it other than on git.

John
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