Following is a (hopefully) painless guide to compiling the excellent astronomy program named XEphem (http://www.clearskyinstitute.com/xephem/) under Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon). XEphem has some unique features and the source code is free for personal/educational use (check the URL for precise terms).

(this is based on a webpage by Paul Bramscher)

Use either sudo apt-get install or Synaptic to pull down (or verify that you already have) the following packages installed:

• gcc
• lesstif2-dev
• libc6-dev
• libxmu-dev
• make

Get the XEphem source code from: www.clearskyinstitute.com. Download it to a directory, for instance your user directory, and ungzip/untar it. It'll be in a directory named "xephem-3.7.2" (depending on version number).

Go to the xephem-3.7.2/GUI/xephem directory, and type:

make MOTIF=../../libXm/linux86

XEphem should now successfully compile after a minute or so, depending on the speed of your hardware.

Go to /xephem-3.7.2/GUI/xephem and type "./xephem" to execute. The first things you might want to do is to set the observer location to your own and confirm that your time/zone information is correctly indicated.

Unless you are willing to run the program from the source directory every time, you could do what I did and move it to a more usable location.

Make a directory called XEphem under whatever diretory you choose. Under my Home directory I have a direcory called LOCAL for things like this.

mkdir ~/LOCAL/XEphem

Move the xephem program to ~/LOCAL/XEphem

XEphem has several support directories which can be found in the source tree in xephem-3.7.2/GUI/, these are auxil; catalogs; fifos; fits; gallery; help and io. Copy all these and their contents into the ~/LOCAL/XEphem directory.

Now you need to let XEphem know where to find these support directories. Create a file called .xephemrc in your Home directory and with your favourite text editor add the following single line to it.

XEphem.PrivateDir: /home/john/LOCAL/XEphem

(Use your own home directory pathname in place of /home/john of course)

You can then use ~/LOCAL/XEphem/xephem to run the program. but its simple to create a link from the Ubuntu panel.

Use the mouse and right-click into an empty area on the panel and select Add to Panel from the menu. Select Custom Application Launcher

and fill in the requestor with something like this:

Change the default application icon to something more suitable and close the requestor and the Add to Panel box.

Updated: October 22, 2007