&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, kde-apps.org, 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. In order to successfully run &kstars;, you need &kde; >=3.2 and &Qt; >=3.2. 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. You can dramatically reduce the memory footprint by reducing the faint limit for stars in the Configuration Window, or eliminating catalogs of objects (NGC, IC, comets, asteroids, &etc;). If &kstars; is idling, it uses very little CPU; but it will use as much as you have got when panning or zooming. 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 do not forget the prefix argument to configure. If your KDEDIR variable is not set, set prefix to whatever folder &kde; is installed in: this is 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. 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 do not have root privileges, copy them to ~/.kde/share/apps/kstars/.)