<appendix id="installation">
<title>Installation</title>

<sect1 id="getting-kstars">
<title>How to obtain &kstars;</title>
<para>
&kstars; is presently available as a source tarball,
a Mandrake RPM, a Debian package, or as CVS source.  If you'd like to contribute
a binary package for your favorite distribution, please let us know!
</para><para>
The latest &kstars; source code tarball can be
obtained from <ulink
 url="http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/kstars/">http://prdownloads.sourceforge
.net/kstars/</ulink>.
It is also posted at the
<ulink url="http://kstars.sourceforge.net">&kstars; homepage</ulink>, at
<ulink url="http://apps.kde.com/uk/0/info/id/1050">apps.kde.com</ulink>, and at
<ulink url="http://freshmeat.net/projects/kstars">freshmeat.net</ulink>.
</para><para>
&kstars; is part of the &kde; project, so if you want the latest CVS development
version, you can get instructions at the
<ulink url="http://developer.kde.org/development-versions/index.html#cvs">&kde;
website</ulink>
</para>
</sect1>

<sect1 id="requirements">
<title>Requirements</title>
<para>
In order to successfully run &kstars;, you need
&kde; >=2.1 and &Qt;>=2.2.4.  It may run on &kde; 2.0 (and a similarly
deprecated &Qt;), but this has not been tested.  If you try, please contact us
with the results (success or failure)!
</para><para>
To compile &kstars;, you will also have to have the following packages
installed:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem><para>kdelibs-devel</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>libqt2-headers</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>zlib-devel</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>autoconf less than 2.5!!</para></listitem>
</itemizedlist>

Autoconf 2.5 is (apparently) incompatible with the files generated by KDevelop.
(This incompatibility is expected to be resolved when &kde; 3.0 is released).
</para><para>
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.
</para>
</sect1>

<sect1 id="compilation">
<title>Compilation and Installation</title>
<para>
In order to compile and install &kstars; on your system, type the following in
 the
base directory of the unpacked &kstars; distribution:
<screen width="40">
<prompt>%</prompt> <userinput>./configure --prefix=$KDEDIR</userinput>
<prompt>%</prompt> <userinput>make</userinput>
<prompt>%</prompt> <userinput>make install</userinput>
</screen>
</para><para>
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 <filename class="directory">/usr</filename>,
<filename class="directory">/opt/kde</filename> or
<filename class="directory">/opt/kde2</filename>.  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 <email>kstars-devel@lists.sourceforge.net</email>.
</para>
</sect1>

<sect1 id="configuration">
<title>Configuration</title>
<para>
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 <filename
class="directory">kstars/data/</filename> to
<filename class="directory">$(KDEDIR)/apps/kstars/</filename> (If you
don't have root priveliges, copy them to
<filename class="directory">~/.kde/share/apps/kstars/.</filename>)
</para>
</sect1>
</appendix>