How to compile the XEphem astronomy program

[Paul Bramscher]

I've put together a short HowTo for anyone interested in compiling and running the XEphem astronomy software on Ubuntu Dapper Drake 6.06. It's an excellent astronomy program and the sourcecode is available for personal/educational use (check the site http://www.clearskyinstitute.com/xephem/ for precise terms).

This HowTo doc should be written clearly enough for a non-techie to get the program up and running. Steps are included to compile on Hoary Hedgehog 5.04 also (Breezy Badger should be similar to one or the other, depending on where it puts the location of the motif libraries): http://www.tc.umn.edu/~brams006/xephem_ubuntu.html

Have fun!
:D

[jnetter]

Your how-to was very easy to follow for this first-time compiler, but something went wrong for me. After running the make command, no executable "xephem" file was produced. I'm using Dapper Drake. Any clues what might have happened? Here's the output from the make command:

jnetter@jnetter-laptop:~/xephem-3.7.1/libz$ make MOTIF=/usr/lib/
gcc -g -Wall -O2 -c -o adler32.o adler32.c
gcc -g -Wall -O2 -c -o compress.o compress.c
gcc -g -Wall -O2 -c -o crc32.o crc32.c
gcc -g -Wall -O2 -c -o uncompr.o uncompr.c
gcc -g -Wall -O2 -c -o deflate.o deflate.c
gcc -g -Wall -O2 -c -o trees.o trees.c
gcc -g -Wall -O2 -c -o zutil.o zutil.c
gcc -g -Wall -O2 -c -o inflate.o inflate.c
gcc -g -Wall -O2 -c -o inftrees.o inftrees.c
gcc -g -Wall -O2 -c -o inffast.o inffast.c
ar rc libz.a adler32.o compress.o crc32.o uncompr.o deflate.o trees.o zutil.o inflate.o inftrees.o inffast.o
ranlib libz.a

[WillEyedOney]

I have had the same problem, did you manage to find a solution?

[jalvesaq]

Paul Bramscher's howto was useful while I was making a .deb package of xephem. The list of commands to build the package are at:

http://jalvesaq.googlepages.com/xephem.html

I'm running Ubuntu 7.10 amd64, but I also have built the package in a virtual machine with Ubuntu 6.06 i386.

[kleeman]

I got an error with your dsc file as it wanted a different sized file with a different md5sum Perhaps the tar.gz file you download from clearsky has changed since you packaged xephem? I got mine to compile by figuring the above two parameters out myself and changing the dsc file.

Thanks for the packaging....

[jalvesaq]

Thanks for reporting the bug! It was caused by a difference in the compression level between the original tarball and the one generated by dpkg:

$ file xephem_3.7.2.orig.tar.gz xephem-3.7.2.tar.gz
xephem_3.7.2.orig.tar.gz: gzip compressed data, from Unix, last modified: Sat Sep 29 23:15:35 2007, max compression
xephem-3.7.2.tar.gz: gzip compressed data, from Unix, last modified: Sun Nov 19 23:34:43 2006

I renamed xephem-3.7.2.tar.gz to xephem_3.7.2.orig.tar.gz, rebuilt the package, and uploaded the new .dsc and .diff files. I think everything is OK now.