Projects/Edu/KStars/Building KStars

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    < Projects‎ | Edu‎ | KStars
    Revision as of 01:19, 4 December 2012 by Akarshsimha (talk | contribs)

    Introduction

    This page is a community effort to document the procedure to build various versions of KStars on various platforms and environments.

    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

    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 libeigen2-dev libcfitsio3-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 :–)