Install celestia on Ubuntu 16.04

Question

Until Ubuntu 15.10 it was possible to install Celestia (a real-time 3D space simulation), using apt:

sudo apt-get install celestia celestia-gnome celestia-common-nonfree

However, in Ubuntu 16.04, the package celestia no longer seems to exist. (apt-cache show celestia returns N: Can't select versions from package 'celestia' as it is purely virtual. The package celestia-common-nonfree does exist, but it's just a collection of data files, which don't conform to the DFSG, that are useless without the program itself.)

Looking upstream, it seems that the package celestia was removed from Debian unstable, before Ubuntu 16.04 entered feature freeze, which (assuming my very vague understanding of the interaction between Debian and Ubuntu is correct) is why it's no longer present in Ubuntu 16.04.

Considering that Celestia hasn't seen any development in the recent past, removing it seems a reasonable course of action. OTOH it's still stable and functional, so it seems a shame, especially if it's still possible to build it on a modern system.

Does this mean that the only way of installing Celestia on Ubuntu 16.04 is building from source?

Answer 1

I haven't tried it, but you can try to install it after downloading the package (and all its dependencies!) for Wily from here.

Answer 2

Celestia development looks like it's started again. This is a compile from source process. With some more encouragement we may get some new binary installs happening.

Here you can find Linux build instructions and here you can download the source

I Installed the NAIF cspice from here as per above instructions.

tldr;

just download, unpack and point to the location in the ./configure command below:

Tested on Ubuntu 16.04 64-bit.

sudo apt install qt4-dev-tools libqt4-dev 

Then cd to your downloaded/unpacked Celestia source, and ...

autoreconf -v -i # might need to run ? if configure fails 
./configure --prefix=/usr --with-lua --with-qt --with-cspice-dir=/YourInstallLocation/NGT/cspice

make
sudo make install

Then..

celestia

Answer 3

The answer provided by dadexix86 works and if you want to check the checksums of the packages for security (since the packages aren't being installed by apt, their integrity is not automatically checked (I think)), it's probably best to do everything manually.

However, for a simple copy-paste solution, the following bash commands should do the job (assuming you have a 64-bit, standard, fresh Ubuntu 16.04 installation):

UBUNTU_MIRROR=https://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/c/celestia

# common
sudo apt-get install liblua5.1-0
wget "${UBUNTU_MIRROR}"/celestia-common_1.6.1+dfsg-3.1_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i celestia-common_1.6.1+dfsg-3.1_all.deb
sudo apt-get install celestia-common-nonfree

# for celestia-glut
wget "${UBUNTU_MIRROR}"/celestia-glut_1.6.1+dfsg-3.1_amd64.deb
sudo apt-get install freeglut3
sudo dpkg -i celestia-glut_1.6.1+dfsg-3.1_amd64.deb

# for celestia-gnome
wget "${UBUNTU_MIRROR}"/celestia-gnome_1.6.1+dfsg-3.1_amd64.deb
sudo apt-get install libgtkglext1 libgnome2-0 libgnomeui-0
sudo dpkg -i celestia-gnome_1.6.1+dfsg-3.1_amd64.deb

This includes the dependencies (installed using apt from Xenial) and celestia-common-nonfree (also installed from Xenial).

Answer 4

You can download Celestia for linux on their website:

http://www.shatters.net/celestia/download.html

Good luck. I hope this helps you.