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[school-discuss] evaluation of astronomy apps at opensource schools ...



hello,

dave prentice, can you check out my results too ...

doug asked me to kick off phase 1 isos on the astronomy apps.
i'm checking them out on a redhat 7.3 box that has a full vanilla install,
should be pretty "typical".

i have been using xplns as a planetarium app for a bit, it took about 5 
minutes to put in, and i was getting good use of the app in less than 15 
minutes.

phase 2 is supposed to be install and run, but that's just not how things work 
around my shop.  we're going to try these.


here's my first set of results on our apps.


3D Planetarium - not ready, download link incorrect,
when i got to a good download site (via e-mail hint to the list) -->
make instructions do not spell out required customizations.

Astronomia - not ready, under construction.

celestia - bad tar file. inadequate documentation.(tar.gz but no gzip in 
there)

geomview - good docs, complete.  install procedure not straight forward for 
redhat 7.3.
(lesstif ... it scared me off)

hitchhiker - no docs at all, requires specific version of gtk.

Konstellation - installs in a snap, extremely primitive.

Kstars looks great, but the gzip tars (.tar.gz) aren't gzipped, the rpm at 
freshmeat installed clean, but 
it can't find cities.dat - web site doesn't say anything about it.

so far, Geomview and Kstars are the only apps that appear to be useable in a 
"typical" environment.  Still, none of these just went in like xplns.

more tomorrow night.

mike eschman, etc ...

-- 
(http://www.etc-edu.com ) Not just an afterthought ...