KDE Community has had the pleasure of announce (via KDE Neon) the release of KStars 3.3.1. The new version is the first maintenance update of the 3.3 series and has arrived, in addition to fixing bugs, to add new functions and experimental add-ons. Although new features are often eye-catching, keep the "experimental" tag in mind. Basically, we will be facing functions that will present us problems, but that will serve to see what is to come to the famous KDE planetarium.
There are two new features that are only available for macOS: the problems reported on astrometry.net have been removed. On the other hand, the DBus works again in this release, which makes Ekos Scheduler operational again. The rest of the news will reach all the platforms on which the planetarium is available, that is, Linux, macOS and Windows.
KStars 3.3.1 now available for Linux, macOS and Windows
Other new features included in this version are:
- New observatory module.
- The meridian flip has been removed.
- Flow window.
- Reset focus frame when mount rotates.
- No longer aborts PHD2 guidance while suspended.
- Switch to homebrew, python3, and astroy for board resolution on OS X.
- Now check if the dust cap is detected before checking if the camera has no shutter or is shuttered.
- Fixed translation issue with Sun, Moon and Earth designations.
Kstars is available in the official Ubuntu repositories, but if we install this version, we will install v3.2.3 of it. If we want to install KStars 3.1.1, the best option is to install your Snap package, something that we can do from the software center of our distribution (if it includes support by default) or by opening a terminal and typing the following command:
sudo snap install kstars
We can also install it from its own repository by typing these commands:
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:mutlaqja/ppa sudo apt update && sudo apt install indi-full kstars-bleeding
For other Linux distributions, you can download their tarball from here. Have you already tried it? What do you think of KStars?
