Projects/Edu/KStars/Building KStars

This page is a community effort to document the procedure to build various versions of KStars for KDE4 on various platforms and environments. We have a separate page for the Frameworks5 version.

Why build from source?

Typically, you would want to build KStars from source if you plan to develop KStars, or stay on the bleeding edge and contribute valuable feedback.

Prerequisite Packages

To build and develop KStars, several packages may be required from your distribution. Here's a list.

Required dependencies

GNU Make, GCC -- Essential tools for building
kdelibs -- KDE libraries
cmake -- buildsystem used by KDE
eigen -- linear algebra library
zlib -- compression library

Optional dependencies

libcfitsio -- FITS library
libindi -- Instrument Neutral Distributed Interface, for controlling equipment.

Installing these packages

To install all of these, use the following commands:

Debian / Kubuntu

  sudo apt-get install build-essential cmake kdelibs5-dev libeigen3-dev libcfitsio3-dev zlib1g-dev

Please note that INDI is unavailable in Debian testing as of this writing.

Documentation on building various versions

Git

KStars development happens on KDE's git repository. (Git is an open-source version control software.). The code on git is the bleeding-edge developers' version of KStars. It does break occasionally.

1) create and change into a KDE development directory:

  mkdir ~/kde; cd ~/kde

2) to fetch the KStars source code:

  git clone git://anongit.kde.org/kstars

3) create and change into a build directory for compilation:

  mkdir build; cd build

4) run the configure process with cmake:

  cmake ../kstars -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=debugfull -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=~/kde/usr

5) compile KStars:

  make

6) finally install KStars:

  make install

That’s all! This installs KStars locally into the separate directory ~/kde/usr, so that your global KDE installation will not be touched at all.

Now on to starting the newly compiled KStars. Create a file ~/kde/run.sh with the following content:

 #!/bin/bash
 export KSTARS_DIR=~/kde/usr
 export PATH=$KSTARS_DIR/bin:$PATH
 export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$KSTARS_DIR/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
 export KDEDIR=$KSTARS_DIR
 export KDEDIRS=$KDEDIR
 export XDG_DATA_DIRS=$XDG_DATA_DIRS:$KSTARS_DIR/share
 # update KDE's system configuration cache
 kbuildsycoca4
 # start app
 $@

Make the script executable with chmod 755 ~/kde/run.sh. Now you can run the compiled KStars version with `~/kde/run.sh kstars`. Just calling `kstars` directly will start the system version of KStars.

You can keep your copy up-to-date by typing `git pull --rebase` in ~/kde/kstars. Feel free to send patches to our mailing list [email protected]. And join #kdeedu on irc.kde.org :–)