Its been almost a year since the autostar function stopped working on my Ubuntu 16.04 box or Mac OSX. With every upgrade I hope it will work again, but so far not.
Without it, I can't use the scheduler or unattended meridian flip. It always selects an empty space, then fails to find a guide star or a focus star,.
Additionally the subframe does not work either, but I can live without that.
When I use Autostar often my images tend to look like this..
I guess it finds a white pixel and start guiding but changes its mind and finds a star to guide on after a while.
Maybe it should be possible to set a parameter to filter out a single pixel and find a star that occupies more than the one pixel and make up its mind to stick with that selection.
I use VNC to connect to my Ubuntu machine but occasionally I run KStars on my MacBook with all my equipment directly connected to it as well. In both cases it works flawlessly.
In order to not guide on a hot pixel you need to take a dark for your guide cam.
I spoke too soon.
It must have been a fluke, and that a star just happened to be in the right location.
All night long it continued to fail. The box would appear in the center of the field of view, regardless if there was a star in it or not - usually not. (90% of the time).
So the auto star function, and even the subframe selector failed. I would select a star, and as soon as I pressed the guide button, it would remove the green box and put it over an empty space.
This is with Lubuntu 18.04 and the latest download of the stable release of INDI and Kstars.