# 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.

Finally, &kstars; has been packaged by many Linux/BSD distributions in the past (including Redhat, Suse, Debian, Mandrake, and FreeBSD), although this was before we became part of the kdeedu module. It remains to be seen if these distros will still package independent releases of &kstars; separately.

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; >=2.1 and &Qt;>=2.2.4. It has been reported not to run under &kde; 2.0.

Note that, beginning with version 0.9, there are separate tarballs for each release, depending on whether you use KDE 2.x or KDE 3.x. The code is identical in each version (we were careful to maintain backward compatibility); the only difference is in the configure/make scripts.

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

- kdelibs-devel

- libqt-headers (a.k.a. qt-devel)

- zlib-devel

- autoconf (2.1 for &kde; 2; 2.5 for &kde; 3)

On my system, &kstars; uses about 50 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. 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 directory 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 directory &kde; is installed in. It's usually either `/usr`, `/opt/kde`, `/opt/kde2`, 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@lists.sourceforge.net.

## 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/.`)