[seul-edu] [Fwd: [school-discuss] evaluation of astronomy apps at opensource schools ...]

[Doug Loss <drloss@suscom.net>]

Mike Eschman is evaluating astronomy apps for the ISO.  He's 
posting his evals to the schoolforge-discuss mailing list for 
some reason, so I'm forwarding them here:

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [school-discuss] evaluation of astronomy apps at 
opensource schools ...
Date: Mon, 20 Jan 2003 19:28:21 -0600
From: mike eschman <meschman@etc-edu.com>
Reply-To: schoolforge-discuss@schoolforge.net
Organization: etc ...
To: School Forge <schoolforge-discuss@schoolforge.net>
CC: Dave Prentice <prentice@instruction.com>

hello,

dave prentice, can you check out my results too ...

doug asked me to kick off phase 1 isos on the astronomy apps.
i'm checking them out on a redhat 7.3 box that has a full vanilla 
install, should be pretty "typical".

i have been using xplns as a planetarium app for a bit, it took 
about 5 minutes to put in, and i was getting good use of the app 
in less than 15 minutes.

phase 2 is supposed to be install and run, but that's just not 
how things work around my shop.  we're going to try these.


here's my first set of results on our apps.


3D Planetarium - not ready, download link incorrect,
when i got to a good download site (via e-mail hint to the list) 
--> make instructions do not spell out required customizations.

Astronomia - not ready, under construction.

celestia - bad tar file. inadequate documentation.(tar.gz but no 
gzip in there)

geomview - good docs, complete.  install procedure not straight 
forward for redhat 7.3. (lesstif ... it scared me off)

hitchhiker - no docs at all, requires specific version of gtk.

Konstellation - installs in a snap, extremely primitive.

Kstars looks great, but the gzip tars (.tar.gz) aren't gzipped, 
the rpm at freshmeat installed clean, but it can't find 
cities.dat - web site doesn't say anything about it.

so far, Geomview and Kstars are the only apps that appear to be 
useable in a "typical" environment.  Still, none of these just 
went in like xplns.

[next message; replies to a correction from another subscriber]

as you suggested, i went to sourceforge and downloaded celestia's 
1.2.5 .tar.gz file from sourceforge.  install took less than 
three minutes and went without a hitch.  the interface is 
intuitive so documentation is not an issue.  the image catalog - 
well, i played with it for two hours.

celestia runs a little sluggish on my test box. a 1 gigahertz 
athalon with 512 meg of ram and a 64 meg video board.  but i had 
5 or 6 other things going  [:-)]

so i'm keeping celestia and will package it with my solor system 
notes.

and my wife and i are going to play with it tonight.

this made doing the evals worthwhile  [:-)]

it's pretty, useful and installs in a snap.

BTW, my initial difficulties stem from the Selu/Edu Application 
Index having a .tar.gz from Celestia 1.2.0, not 1.2.4, for 
download, and it was a .gz with no gzip in there.

[eval of nightfall]

this is a serious educational application that installs in a 
snap.  the gnuplots that it produces are suitable for classroom 
handouts.

i was able to figure out how to use it quickly, but effective use 
will require thought and preparation.  when the solar system 
series is finished, i think i would like to create a handbook 
that uses nightfall as a backbone.

the user interface gets an a+.

serious quality software for the classroom.

[eval of open universe]

make fails :

cfglex, undeclared strcpy ???

looks easy to fix, but how many teachers are going to poke their 
noses in your c code ?

[eval of partiview]

i'll have to come back to this one tonight.  we use cvs for our 
support of us army corps of engineers, but the one time i tried 
it at a public school district in louisiana, it was a disaster. 
no one would even give it a try.

the site mentions "branded" tars and zips, so i went to freshmeat 
and looked for partiview.  no soap.

judging by the level of care and detail in the docs, i'm not 
willing to let this one go.  the idea of it makes it a great 
classroom fit, and it has the fit and finish in the docs that 
"smell" like pure winner.

[eval of planets: an orbital simulator]

the .tgz is a mistake (i don't know what a .tgz is), but the rpm 
installed in a snap.

if some physics teacher would write a set of lesson plans using 
this, you would have a real winner.

[eval of Mars Simulator, orbitview, and planetizer]

i don't do java.  maybe someone else can eval these.

personally, i think it is completely wrong-headed to include any 
apps that use xml or java, both of which are battlegrounds for 
vendor disputes, in the group's application cd.

[Mike also says Magallanes is Windows only, in spite of what the 
Sourceforge page says.  I'll be removing it from the App Index. 
Would someone else please evaluate the three java-based apps 
above?  There's nothing wrong with our including java apps on our 
ISO; it's just another language.]

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Doug Loss                 Courage is resistance to
Data Network Coordinator  fear, mastery of fear --
Bloomsburg University     not absence of fear.
dloss@bloomu.edu           Mark Twain