PixInsight 1.8.1.1087 Ripley Released

[Juan Conejero]

Hi all,

A new version of PixInsight has been just released and is now available to all users: 1.8.1.1087 for FreeBSD, Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

Build 1087 is a bugfix/maintenance release. We encourage all users to update their installations as soon as possible.


How to Install the Release

This version is not available through the update system. You have to download the appropriate installation package(s) for your platform(s) from our Software Distribution system:

https://pixinsight.com/dist/

Simply uninstall your current version and install the new one:

FreeBSD and Linux: PixInsight installation packages are gzip-compressed tar archives (.tar.gz). To install one of these archives, extract its full contents on any directory, preferably on one located under your home directory. Then become root and run the installer program from a terminal. For complete information on the PixInsight Linux/UNIX installer program, see this forum post:

http://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?topic=6336.0

Mac OS X: Uncompress the .zip archive to get the PixInsight.app application bundle. It can be executed from any location, but we recommend copying it to the standard /Applications folder, and optionally adding it to the Dock.

Windows: We provide standard Windows installation packages. To install one of these packages, launch the executable file and follow the instructions. Once installed, you'll have a new entry on your Start > All Programs menu (or equivalent item on Windows 8), namely PixInsight Platform, where you'll find an option to launch the PixInsight Core application. The installation also includes an uninstall utility.


Bug Fixes

* SVG rendering routines were not thread-safe in previous 1.8.1 builds. SVG files can now be loaded from multiple concurrent threads, as happens with the rest of supported file formats.

* Transparent images (or images with alpha channels) were not being rendered correctly on view thumbnails (for example, when hovering an image icon with the mouse). Thumbnails for transparent images are now generated according to view transparency settings.

* Maximum and minimum pixel value coordinates were being incorrectly reported by the Statistics tool. This is now fixed.

* This version fixes a severe performance degradation in the JavaScript StarDetector object, which has been causing problems with several scripts in the previous build 1083 of PixInsight. In particular, this bug was drawing the SubframeSelector script almost unusable. This problem is now fixed on all platforms.


Information on New Features

* Support for FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE. In particular, PixInsight runs now extremely well on the just-released PC-BSD 10 Joule distribution.

* The Blink tool, written by Nikoly Volkov, is now able to generate movies by invoking external video encoding applications. For example, ffmpeg supports a wide range of video formats, and ImageMagick's convert utility can be used to create animated GIF images very easily. See Nikolay's original announcement post.

* [Mainly for developers] PixInsight consoles (for example, the Process Console window, as well as consoles created by modules) support now standard ANSI escape codes. The whole set of escape codes is supported except indexed colors with ESC[5;...m. KDE's Konsole extended 24-bit color space is fully supported. For a detailed description of this new feature, see the documentation for the Console PCL class. A direct consequence of this feature is that notification, warning and error console messages can now be colorized for improved readability.


I hope you enjoy this new release.

[Conor]

Information on New Features

* Support for FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE. In particular, PixInsight runs now extremely well on the just-released PC-BSD 10 Joule distribution.

I really appreciate this one, Juan. It's awesome to finally be able to use PixInsight again! It works flawlessly on FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE. You stayed true to your word.

I hope you enjoy this new release.

I certainly am. Really, thanks again for all the hard work to you and the PixInsight team.

[Juan Conejero]

Hi Conor,

I am glad to know it works well. I really love this release of FreeBSD, and especially PC-BSD 10.

I am considering the possibility to replace Linux with FreeBSD 10 on most of our development workstations. Some missing elements in our development chain may prevent me from doing so, such as no native CUDA devkit for FreeBSD, or no native version of VMware Workstation, among others, but that's definitely what I'd like to do.

The BSD license is the natural place for the PixInsight project. In fact, our PCL license is a variant of the BSD license. We don't understand open source as an obligation, but as an option. We use Linux just because it is currently the only viable UNIX-like operating system for our development work, but if we can replace it with FreeBSD without losing the functionality that we need, I won't doubt a microsecond

[papaf]

Care to elaborate on this? I toyed with FreeBSD just for my very small (as in atom processor small) home server, but I found that it eats up resources much quicker than an equivalent (as in with same functions) ubuntu server installation.
What's so much better in FreeBSD, or PCBSD, that makes you said that?