Review: KStars 0.9 Revisited: KDE and Linux instead of OS X?

Product: KStars 0.9
OS X/Classic: Yes/No
Publisher: KDE
URL: http://edu.kde.org/kstars
Category: Planetarium
Price: GNU General Public License
Requirements: Power Macintosh G3 or G4 running OS X, X11 and an X Windows server

Product: KDE
OS X/Classic: Yes/No
Publisher: KDE
URL: http://www.kde.org
Category: Operating System
Price: GNU General Public License
Requirements: Power Macintosh G3 or G4 running OS X, X11 and an X Windows server (or Linux)

Product: Yellow Dog Linux
OS X/Classic: No/No
Publisher: Yellow Dog
URL: http://www.yellowdoglinux.com
Category: Operating System
Price: Commercial product from $30, but (unsupported) free download available
Requirements: Power Macintosh

As regular readers of my contributions to AppleLust will know, one of the things that fascinates me most about OS X is that it is really three operating systems in one. First there is the Aqua front end of OS X, with all its spiffy new features from the Dock and column views through to crash protection and truly modern memory management. Then there’s Classic, which allows you to run your older, non-OS X native, applications. And finally there’s a version of UNIX known as Darwin, upon which all the rest of OS X is based but most users otherwise ignore. In an earlier AppleLust series I looked at how users can unleash the potential of the UNIX side of OS X via the Terminal and most especially by installing an X Windows server such as Apple’s new X11 program or an old favourite like OroborOSX.

In my first look at KStars, I was impressed by what the application was able to do, crippled as it was by the only partial integration between KStars and OS X. The Fink team have done a good job of getting the application to run on the Mac, no question; but as it stands now, X Windows servers running in OS X can’t quite mimic all the abilities and features of a traditional Linux installation on PC hardware. X Windows on OS X simply doesn’t join up all the computer resources with each other, such as a ‘connect to a web page’ message from an X Windows application to your Macintosh web browser. There would seem to be two options then if you really want to see KStars fly: either install and run the full KDE environment, KStars, web browsers, helper applications and all onto OS X using Fink; or replace OS X with a PowerPC compatible Linux installation and then add KDE and KStars to that. I tried both.

Round One: KDE on OS X, using Fink

I’ve written at length about the Fink project and the remarkably straightforward way it provides Mac users access to hundreds of UNIX and X Windows applications. As noted with KStars, Fink can only go so far in accommodating X Windows applications within the rest of the operating system. KDE, or the K Desktop Environment to give it its full name, is a graphical front end for X Windows. It gives X Windows users Finder-like features like file directory views with icons, buttons for launching applications, a trash can to store and delete unwanted files, and so on. Perhaps nothing special for Mac users, who’ve had all this stuff for almost twenty years, but for the UNIX folks this is a day at the beach. There are other projects and packages that do a similar sort of thing, and indeed one might argue a great strength of UNIX lies in the fact that users aren’t tied down to a single operating system or graphical user interface. Gnome is perhaps the best known of such alternatives, and is also available for OS X via Fink.

Installing KDE is relatively easy, and can be downloaded in the same way as any other Fink package. Once installed though it won’t run automatically. Instead, the user needs to tweak a file called the xinitrc and located in your Home directory as “.xinitrc”. The xinitrc file is sort of like a preference file, it contains a message that X Windows reads when launched and then behaves accordingly. Getting to this file can be tricky; by default OS X won’t let you see files belonging with a dot, or save files that way either (try it and see!). BBEdit can be used to see these hidden files using the Open Hidden command under the File menu, or you can use any one of the many UNIX text editors. If you’ve not yet run X Windows, then this file might not exist and you’ll need to create it, otherwise simply replace what’s there with the following:

source /sw/bin/init.sh
/sw/bin/startkde >/tmp/kde.log 2>&1

Once you’ve done this then launch X11 or XDarwin and they will read the xinitrc file and start up KDE. By default OroborOSX ignores this xinitrc file unless told to run it using that option under the File menu, a great feature if you want to run X Windows applications alongside regular OS X ones without the KDE desktop getting in the way.

KDE launches like a whole new operating system, replacing the regular OS X desktop with its own KDE one. With XDarwin the two desktops can be toggled using the Command, Control and A keys, while X11 and OroborOSX interleaves the Aqua and KDE desktops allowing Command-Tab or the Dock to be used for switching between the two. The KDE desktop is remarkably easy to get around, particularly if you’ve had some experience with X Windows applications either on within Mac OS X or on UNIX machines generally. This isn’t the place to go into the details of using KDE and all the various accessory programs that come with it, except to mention that while a couple of programs needed to fully use KStars are included (a web browser called Konqueror and an image viewer called KView), KStars itself isn’t and will need to be installed separately. This can be done either by itself or as part of the KDE edutainment package, “kdeedu3”.

Within this hybrid KDE/OS X environment, KStars works remarkably well. The contextual menu links to the SEDS astronomy information archive work, via the default KDE browser Konqueror and using the OS X network configuration without any need for additional tweaking. A mouse with three buttons and a scroll wheel works fine, giving quick access to contextual menus and fast zooming in and out. There are some glitches though. I couldn’t read the KStars Handbook (it requires the KDE Help program, which doesn’t seem to work at all), and connecting with the Digitized Sky Survey works but incompletely. While the program accesses and downloads the images, KStars built-in viewer doesn’t seem to work in this KDE on OS X mixture. Instead you’ll need to save the images to disk and view them using something like KView.

All in all then, installing KDE is a painless way to expand what KStars can do, and although it doesn’t quite solve all the problems mentioned in the earlier article, it does fix the most serious.

Round Two: KDE on Yellow Dog Linux

Yellow Dog Linux is a version (or distribution, to use the Linux terminology) of the Linux operating system designed for use on PowerPC computers. In fact it is possible to by new Apple computers directly from Yellow Dog with this version of Linux pre-installed and configured. Alternatively you can download the software for free, burn your own CD from it, and use that to install Yellow Dog Linux (“YDL”). What this route lacks is technical support and the manual, which believe me you’re going to need.

Downloading the software took the best part of an hour even with my fast DSL line, but other than trying to make sure I downloaded the latest version (currently version 2.3) I didn’t have any problems here. I then installed YDL onto my now semi-retired 500 MHz dual-USB iBook. Installing the software isn’t as simple as the Mac OS X installer. For a start you need to partition and format the drive. I did the simplest thing and erased the entire hard drive and then prepped it for YDL alone; if you want to have OS X or OS 9 as well then you’ll need a partition or two for those as well. Now, let it not be said that Yellow Dog doesn’t offer enough information to get through the installation. In fact the support pages at their web site have plenty of clearly laid out and well written instructions and help files. Of course if you only have one computer then reading these pages while actually installing the software isn’t going to be possible, and that’s where the manual will be very useful. But to cut a very long story short, the hard disk needed to be divided into three sections, one the main partition for the software, documents and so on, a small one for something called “yaboot” that interprets the power-on signal from the keyboard and starts loading the operating system, and another small partition known as the swap partition that will be used by the virtual memory software. All of this is fiddly because you’ll need to make the partitions first using your Mac start-up CD with its disk tools, and then name and assign them correctly after starting the machine up using the YDL installer CD.

Once installation was complete, I went through the wizard to set up things like network configurations, and was ready to go get KStars. I duly downloaded the KStars source, fired up a terminal, and set out to uncompress, configure and make KStars. But it was not to be. I had foolishly (it turned out) installed the ‘home and office user’ version of YDL, and what I really should have done was to install the ‘developer’ version. Important things like compilers were missing. Okay, run the installer again. This is where it got, literally, painful. The installer chugs away but maddeningly tells you every file that has already been installed. To proceed you need to click an “OK” button. There are hundreds and hundreds of files already installed, and for every one I had to hit “OK”. My poor little finger was aching by the end of this insanity. Anyway, eventually all was complete, and I set out to install KStars again. Oops! Can’t do this without logging in as the Root user (the system administrator), so log out as me and log in again as Root.

Finally getting somewhere I thought as the program starting to configure. But eventually it coughed, spluttered out some words that meant nothing to me, and gave up. Basically, compiling software for a PowerPC version of Linux isn’t any easier than it is for OS X because the source code “expects” to come across generic Wintel hardware. I know nothing about remedying this, although as the Fink project shows it can be done. I did manage to find a version of KStars that had been ported to Darwin, using a tool called KPackage that has a lot in common with Fink. So I downloaded and compiled that version of KStars, and hurrah! It worked! Well, for a moment at least -- after launching it crashed.

It seemed there were some files missing, so what I did was to look at the Fink installation of KStars on OS X and compared that with the installation on YDL to see which files had been put in the wrong places. By turning on FTP file sharing on the PowerBook running OS X and connecting the two machines with an Ethernet cable, it was easy to use Konqueror to access the hard disk of the PowerBook and copy the files across to where they belonged. Once all this was done, I launched KStars again, and it worked perfectly!

As can be seen here, the help system worked fine, and that is a great boon to users wanting to explore KStars a bit more fully that I have at AppleLust. Connecting to the Digitized Sky Survey also worked well, although the captions did seem to be a bit blurry.

But will Mac users find going through all this worthwhile? The simplest way to answer that is to say that after this review was done I formatted the iBook’s hard drive and put OS 9 back. Yes, YDL does allow Linux programs to run better and more smoothly, and yes, KDE is a nice, easy to use operating system front end. But the installation process is painfully complicated and getting third party software that doesn’t come with the Yellow Dog distribution to run is downright horrible. Because these programs are all tailor-made to any given machine, there are no self-extracting archives or disk images of software waiting to be downloaded, installed and run.

What about KStars? Well, the more I use it the more I’m impressed by it. In its natural habitat –- Linux –i it is a great little program. On OS X, with KDE running alongside, it is compromised yes, but still well worth looking at, and a useful addition to the ever-growing range of Mac astronomy software.

- Dr. Neale Monks

What do you think? Talk about it in our forum for Macintosh Astronomers...

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