[school-discuss] [Fwd: Re: Celestia being considered for schoolforge & Simple EndUser Linux/EDU, but speed's a problem!]

[Charlie Cosse <ccosse@asymptopia.com>]

Here is the reply from the author of celestia; in fact i don't have
accelerated graphics (but my desktop does -- phew!) So?

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Celestia being considered for schoolforge & Simple End User 
Linux/EDU, but speed's a problem!
Date: Wed, 22 Jan 2003 14:32:03 -0800 (PST)
From: Chris Laurel <claurel@www.shatters.net>
To: Charlie Cosse <ccosse@asymptopia.com>
CC: schoolforge-discuss@schoolforge.net

On Wed, 22 Jan 2003, Charlie Cosse wrote:

> Dear Mr. Laurel,
> recently i began working with the SEUL(SimpleEndUserLinux) group, which
> is the most-likely-to-succeed educational linux distribution (i think
> and hope). My first post to their group was to point out the existence
> of celestia.

Thanks for considering Celestia for SEUL.  I'm very interested in seeing
Celestia adopted more in education.

>
> People were impressed, as i continue to be. Now they are evaluating
> various packages for suitability of inclusion in their distribution.
> People are saying that celestia runs slow on their machines. It also
> is sticky on my 1 GHz laptop w/384 M of ram. They are suggesting that
> it might not be suitable for schools.

Any processor 300MHz or faster should be adequate for Celestia.  The key
thing is a decent graphics card and the right drivers.  Ideally, you want
a 3D graphics accelerator with 32 megs of RAM (though 16 and even 8 will
usually suffice.)  I don't know too much about Linux OpenGL driver support
for various graphics cards, but since I work for NVIDIA, I do know that we
provide a very solid Linux driver.  It's not installed by default on most
Linux distributions though.  If you do have an NVIDIA card, go to
www.nvidia.com and look at the download drivers section.

 >
> Personally, i regard your software as the pinacle of software evolution.
> That is, the ultimate software has now been written. It quickly gave my
> 2 children an excellent perspective on how things work. It would be very
> unfortunate for your software not to be included in this distribution.
> Is there anything you can do? Version 1.2.5 is sticky on most everyones
> Linux machines. Personally, i'm running Mandrake 9.0 with the above
> hardware.  Compilation was smooth. Thanks for considering this,

Making Celestia run smoothly is dependent upon having a good graphics card
and a correctly installed OpenGL driver.  Many Linux systems today have
the former, but not the latter.  On the systems that have trouble running
Celestia, try running another 3D application (TuxRacer perhaps?)  I
suspect that they'll run poorly as well . . .  If that's the case, find
out what sort of graphics card is in the computer and see if you can
install a new OpenGL driver for it.

Let me know if you need some further advice on graphics hardware and
installing drivers, or if you think that the problems you're having are
caused by something else.

--Chris