Am Dienstag, 6. Juli 2021, 19:12:43 CEST schrieb Emilio Ortiz Linux:

Hello everybody,

First of all I would like to thank Brandon and Mathias for all the great
work done with xephem. I compiled it on Debian 10 with no issues and
installed the rpm file Mathias built, on my Fedora 34 VM without any
problems. After Mathias announced the AppImage, I downloaded it on my
Debian 10, but before I deleted the previous one I compiled, and deleted
resources and the XEphem file to give a clean try to the AppImage. It got
running but with the same issues that Woei Mun described. The program did
not find the resources, so I recreated the resources folder and the XEphem
file and the xephem AppImage got running without problems.

isn't mint debian based?

I guess i need to spin up a few VMs.


Cheers
MH

Am Dienstag, 6. Juli 2021, 19:12:43 CEST schrieb Emilio Ortiz Linux:

Hello everybody,

First of all I would like to thank Brandon and Mathias for all the great
work done with xephem. I compiled it on Debian 10 with no issues and
installed the rpm file Mathias built, on my Fedora 34 VM without any
problems. After Mathias announced the AppImage, I downloaded it on my
Debian 10, but before I deleted the previous one I compiled, and deleted
resources and the XEphem file to give a clean try to the AppImage. It got
running but with the same issues that Woei Mun described. The program did
not find the resources, so I recreated the resources folder and the XEphem
file and the xephem AppImage got running without problems.

isn't mint debian based?

I guess i need to spin up a few VMs.


Cheers
MH

On Jun 24, 2021, at 10:46 AM, Brandon Rhodes <brandon@...> wrote:

I’ve now returned from some early Summer travel and have finished giving a talk that I’d promised to give at a recent (remote) conference. Now that I’ll be online for the rest of the summer and able to respond to any breakages I cause, I’ve been emboldened to try my hand at an XEphem release from the GitHub source repository.

Thanks to all of you who have been sharing the tweaks and fixes that have gotten XEphem working for you locally, in particular removing the old -lXp compile flag and (for Linux users) switching away from the old Motif library bundled with XEphem’s source code so that XEphem can use your distribution’s own up-to-date Motif library compiled against its own X libraries.

I can confirm that XEphem 4.0.2 builds and runs just fine on Ubuntu versions from the old 14.04 all the way up to the current 21.04, with two simple commands:

sudo apt install build-essential groff-base libmotif-dev libxext-dev libxmu-dev libxt-dev
make

A few questions for the list.

1. Are there any Debian package maintainers among us? With its new license, XEphem can now qualify to be an official Debian and Ubuntu package for people to effortlessly apt install, but I would rather not go through all the steps to become a Debian maintainer myself as I have quite a few projects ongoing already.

2. I will be happy for the install instructions to expand to cover all UNIX-like operating systems, though I only use Ubuntu myself. If you know of anything that should be added to and (which currently focus only on Debian/Ubuntu and MacOS), let me know and I will be happy to update them.

3. At least some MacOS users when they try compiling and running XEphem. I?do have an old Mac laptop here in the house, but might not have time this summer to try compiling and installing XEphem on it. If anyone knows how to resolve the various issues that have been reported, I’ll be happy to update the repository with any fixes. I’m not familiar enough with the MacOS ecosystem to know whether, for example, something like brew might provide the Motif libraries, or whether an XEphem recipe could be added to brew to make installing XEphem automatic for its users.

Thanks again to everyone for the helpful recent discussions. Hopefully we’ll soon have XEphem running without snags for everyone who tries it on a modern operating system!

Hi,


what OS are you on? For me on openSUSE all that works just fine, for an old
useraccount with ~/.xephem folder, as well as for a new one whithout...


Cheers
MH

Am Montag, 5. Juli 2021, 15:47:48 CEST schrieb How Woei Mun:

Hi Mathias,

Thanks for your effort, much appreciated.

I have downloaded the
"xephem-4.0.2-lp152.1.1.Build2.1.glibc2.15-x86_64.AppImage"

Changed the excess rights to "executable", and got it running.

When I try to change location, it prompt me;
"/home/userxxx/.xephem/external.txt" not found.

Once I manage to "create a new location", I was able to update. But when
I request for Earth view,
"/tmp/.mount_xephemnTosfn/usr/auxil/dearth.gif": No such file or directory.

Requesting for a skyview, will cause the whole program to close.

Going into "View" pull down menu ->Data Table ->Control ->X select will
cause the whole program to close.

I can perform; Web update.

Sorry, I have reported so many problems.


woeimun

On 5/7/21 8:38 pm, Mathias Homann wrote:

Am Donnerstag, 24. Juni 2021, 16:46:35 CEST schrieb Brandon Rhodes:

I have made an AppImage file that should work "just like that" on any
linux. The AppImage is here:

AppImage/

Please give it a try and let me know what you think.

Cheers
MH

Hi Mathias,

Thanks for your effort, much appreciated.

I have downloaded the
"xephem-4.0.2-lp152.1.1.Build2.1.glibc2.15-x86_64.AppImage"

Changed the excess rights to "executable", and got it running.

When I try to change location, it prompt me;
"/home/userxxx/.xephem/external.txt" not found.

Once I manage to "create a new location", I was able to update. But when
I request for Earth view,
"/tmp/.mount_xephemnTosfn/usr/auxil/dearth.gif": No such file or directory.

Requesting for a skyview, will cause the whole program to close.

Going into "View" pull down menu ->Data Table ->Control ->X select will
cause the whole program to close.

I can perform; Web update.

Sorry, I have reported so many problems.


woeimun

On 5/7/21 8:38 pm, Mathias Homann wrote:

Am Donnerstag, 24. Juni 2021, 16:46:35 CEST schrieb Brandon Rhodes:

I have made an AppImage file that should work "just like that" on any
linux. The AppImage is here:

AppImage/

Please give it a try and let me know what you think.

Cheers
MH

Am Donnerstag, 24. Juni 2021, 16:46:35 CEST schrieb Brandon Rhodes:

I have made an AppImage file that should work "just like that" on any linux.
The AppImage is here:

AppImage/

Please give it a try and let me know what you think.

Cheers
MH

On Fri, Apr 16, 2021 at 3:56 PM Elwood Downey <elwood.downey@... <mailto:elwood.downey@...>> wrote:
Hi Brandon,
Well, the link is helpful, but what I meant was the doc pages themselves might best be absorbed into github so they can be updated over time as well.
Not that editing them would be any fun. I originally wrote all the docs using Applixware (anyone remember that?) and when that disappeared I hand-edited the html it generated from then on.
In short, feel free to scrape clearskyinstitute.com/xephem <> for anything you find?useful.
Thanks very much for permission to snag the?XEphem web site as well! I got busy preparing for travel in late April, but I have finally downloaded the “xephem/” directory from your Clear Sky Institute site with “wget -r”, and added the resulting files to a “Site” directory in the repository. It looks like the result works without any hand-editing!
<>
Happily, nearly all the links in your docs are already relative links, so they are working just fine even though the base URL has changed. Very nice.
I'm not sure I ever used Applixware, though the name is familiar. The Sun labs at Georgia Tech had FrameMaker installed, so that's what I used for a few projects when plain text and TeX didn't seem to fit a particular problem. I don't remember if I ever tried to export HTML from it or not.
I’ll update the project README to point out that this documentation is now also available in-repo. Thanks again!