Stellarium 'portable' - AppImage-based - current release, v21.3

[mikewalsh]

Afternoon, gang.

I've been toying with the idea of turning this into a portable for a while now. Older versions were quite happy to run on an integrated graphics card; more recent releases have now been built to require OpenGL compatibility. Newer Intel/AMD integrated graphics should be fine with this, but those of you running older hardware will only be able to run this with a discrete graphics card.....and it will need to be running the proprietary driver. 'Nouveau' just doesn't cut it with current OpenGL.

This is the current release - v21.3.

AppImage-based, as several of my portables are, but this fixes the issue of AppImages leaving config files all over the place every time you run them in a different Puppy, by keeping them self-contained and sym-linking out to the expected locations at run-time. Sym-links are them removed again at close.

MenuEntry scripts permit the addition of a menu entry if desired, from wherever the portable is located.

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As always; d/l.....unzip.....locate the portable directory wherever you want, though preferably outside the 'save'. Click to enter, click the 'LAUNCH' script to fire it up. Easy-peasy.

Anyone who's interested can find it here:-

https://mega.nz/folder/SS4QhbAB#0VJ5lJLmF_9hV3Kj8Mhw6w

It IS quite large, at just under 300 MB; I don't know what the Stellarium team have done here, since older releases were barely half this size.....unless some of the additional 'data' directories are now included as standard?

Anyway; "you pays your money, and takes your pick".....as the old saying goes. Enjoy.

Mike.

[KevinTheGerbil]

I've been using this in Bionicpup64 (my current daily driver) for a while now - works really nicely. Thanks Mike for yet another great portable package, I seem to be using a lot of these!

Now, a question (for any/all readers of this forum - apologies if I should have put this in the REQUESTS area but it seemed relevant enough here):

I have an old Toshiba C640 laptop with limited graphics capabilities which for various reasons I'd like to get Stellarium up & running on. For this machine I'd prefer to compile Stellarium 0.12.9 (version intended specifically for older graphics cards) from source - I did this a while back when running Tahrpup, and got it to work very effectively. It needs qt4 to compile and also has smaller footprint and resource usage than recent releases, of course.

However... Although the 0.12.9 source code is still available, and the build instructions can still be found on the "old" Stellarium wiki via the Wayback Machine, there was also a detailed list/table of the required build dependencies/options available as a link from that build instruction page on the old wiki. Unfortunately I can't find a copy of this anywhere on the web now (the archived pages in the Wayback Machine are blank and AFAICT it's disappeared completely from the more recent online Stellarium documentation).

So, more in hope than expectation: Before I go and ask the Stellarium folks for this info (with the inevitable pointless questions as to why I would want to still use v0.12.9 and why don't I get a better machine instead etc...), is there anyone in Puppy Land who might have a list of the build dependencies archived somewhere?

- Kevin

[KevinTheGerbil]

OK, so I think I've got a solution already!

I discovered that Alexander Wolf (Stellarium developer for 0.12 series) has a personal package archive here, which seems to contain latest 0.12 series versions (currently at v0.12.11):

https://launchpad.net/~alexwolf/+archiv ... /+packages

I downloaded and installed the stellarium-data and stellarium .deb packages for Bionic (in that order), ran the "Check dependencies installed pkg" application, installed the various libqt4 dependencies that were identified using PPM, and...off we go! Seems to run beautifully, although I do need to update some of the Celestrak urls to properly update the satellite TLEs (Keplers) as the sources have changed recently ( for those interested there's a current list here: https://celestrak.org/NORAD/elements/ ).

Version 0.12.11 runs blazingly fast compared the the latest versions (it's noticeably faster on the "rescued-roadkill" Toshiba C640 laptop (dual-core Pentium P6200) that I'm posting this from, compared to the v21-portable on my other machine (HP Elitebook 8470p with quad-core Intel i7-3520M). It's also simpler to set up and use as there are fewer "unnecessary" (IMHO - but YMMV) bells & whistles to contend with.

All that's needed now is a portable version (it takes up very roughly 200MB in the savefile otherwise) and things would be perfect...

- Kevin