# Installation

## How to obtain &kstars;

&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!

The latest &kstars; source code tarball can be obtained from http://prdownloads.sourceforge .net/kstars/. It is also posted at the &kstars; homepage, at apps.kde.com, and at freshmeat.net.

&kstars; is part of the &kde; project, so if you want the latest CVS development version, you can get instructions at the &kde; website

## Requirements

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)!

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

- kdelibs-devel

- libqt2-headers

- zlib-devel

- autoconf less than 2.5!!

`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).

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` or `/opt/kde2`. 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/.`)