# Installation

## How to obtain &kstars;

&kstars; is distributed with &kde; as part of the kdeedu "Edutainment" module.

We also occasionally make an independent release. These independent releases will be available as a gzipped tar archive from the following website: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/kstars/.

Independent releases are announced through the kstars-announce@lists.sourceforge.net mailing list. Releases are also posted to the &kstars; home page, apps.kde.com, and freshmeat.net.

&kstars; is been packaged by many Linux/BSD distributions, including Redhat, Suse, and Mandrake. Some distributions package &kstars; as a separate application, some just provide a kdeedu package, which includes &kstars;.

If you would like the latest CVS development version of &kstars;, please follow these instructions.

## Requirements

In order to successfully run &kstars;, you need &kde; >=3.0 and &Qt;>=3.0. As of version 1.0, we no longer support &kde; 2.x.

To compile &kstars;, you will also have to have the following packages installed:

- kdelibs-devel

- qt-devel

- zlib-devel

- fam-devel

- png-devel

- jpeg-devel

- autoconf (>=2.5)

On my system, &kstars; uses about 60 MB of system memory with the default settings. Most of this usage is due to the loaded object databases, especially the 40,000-member stars database. You can dramatically reduce the memory footprint by reducing the faint limit for stars in the Configuration Window. Of course, if you have memory to spare, you can increase the faint limit to display up to 126,000 stars. If &kstars; is idling, it uses very little CPU; but it will use as much as you've got when panning or zooming.

## Compilation and Installation

In order to compile and install &kstars; on your system, type the following in the base folder of the unpacked &kstars; distribution:

    % ./configure --prefix=$KDEDIR
    % make
    % make install

Please don't forget the prefix argument to configure. If your `KDEDIR` variable isn't set, set prefix to whatever folder &kde; is installed in. It's usually either `/usr`, `/opt/kde`, or `/opt/kde3`. Also, make sure you do the last step as `root`.

&kstars; uses `autoconf` and `automake`, so you should not have trouble compiling it. Should you run into problems please report them to the &kstars; mailing list kstars-devel@kde.org.

## Configuration

At this point, there are no special configuration options or requirements. If &kstars; complains that there are missing data files, become `root` and manually copy all files in `kstars/data/` to `$(KDEDIR)/apps/kstars/` (If you don't have `root` privileges, copy them to `~/.kde/share/apps/kstars/.`)