v1.6.0 Crashes almost EVERY time I try to read from or write to the HDD

[chris.baron]

I suspected he was using Fedora. I've used it over time for convenience at work as we run RHEL extensively but I got sick of breaking my machine every few days after applying some update. Fedora's a bit bleeding edge on a machine I rely heavily on at the office. Ubuntu though it's missing a lot of RedHat specific tools is a decent balance between Fedora (constantly updated) and Debian (brutally slow release cycles but stable).

At least he didn't make the installer an RPM

Cheers,
Chris

[Carlos Milovic]

We could have a repository, and .debs

[chris.baron]

That'd definitely be nice, but I like that the static binaries run pretty much everywhere. Well, everywhere that you're running truly the latest glibc anyway

Plus I'm too lazy/busy to offer to maintain the repo

Chris

[Carlos Milovic]

I was just kidding Indeed, it is just too much work (right now building a new release of PI is a monumental work... consider that it is released in 5 OS flavours (if including 32/64 bits), and there are 3 different compilations of each one [trial, commercial and developer's]).

Anyway, some kind of automatic upgrade system (in a way based on linux's repositories) could be a good way to keep everything updated, specially if there are only minor changes, or changes in modules.


Well, I think that we got side-tracked here Acording Juan, Fedora provides an excellent platform for developers. I had some problems with Eclipse, and so far I have been unable to compile in Ubuntu. It has been quite frustrating, since I hate working in Windows So, I guess that I'll create a partition just to work with PixInsight in Fedora, and another for personal things in Ubuntu... Not a pleasant idea anyway. Do you think that the transition would be smooth? How is the application repositories for Fedora compared to Ubuntu/Debian?

[chris.baron]

Slightly better repos for Ubuntu in my opinion, but with RPMForge Fedora comes very close. Debian provides little in the way of official updates other than security fixes. Even their bleeding edge stuff is relatively stable/old

I personally find Ubuntu to be the one distro as a user to "just work" more or less out of the box as a desktop distro but all have their virtues. I'd tend to use Centos/RHEL/Novell(Suse) for servers though. The one thing to keep in mind is that they're all better than Windows

I would kill for full ascom support on Linux. Wouldn't it be awesome to shell into your remote box and either use or create a perl application to automate your imaging run?

One day.....

[Juan Conejero]

Hi Chris and Carlos,

PixInsight's primary development platform is Linux. Currently my main workstations run Fedora 11 and Fedora 12 x86_64.

I use Windows exclusively to build the application and carry out performance and stability tests. Occasionally I run some debug session on Visual C++, when some Windows-specific problem gets really hard to understand.

I use Mac OS X quite a lot, mainly because I really like it as a user, although I absolutely hate OS X for software development. I carry out all Mac OS X development via SSH from my main Linux workstation (Fedora 11).

/home/cbaron/PixInsight/bin/./PixInsight: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libxml2.so.2: undefined symbol: gzopen64

Sorry for that Chris. I'll include libxml2.so in the bin/lib directory of all PI's Linux distributions to avoid these problems.

Fedora's a bit bleeding edge on a machine I rely heavily on at the office.

IMO this doesn't happen anymore after Fedora 8 or so. Fedora 11 and 12 are really solid operating systems that you can rely on (I personally find Fedora 11 a somewhat better distribution than 12). I use Fedora on all my development machines and I have absolutely no problem.

consider that it is released in 5 OS flavours (if including 32/64 bits)

A port to FreeBSD is also planned during 2010. Call me mad  8)

[chris.baron]

PixInsight's primary development platform is Linux. Currently my main workstations run Fedora 11 and Fedora 12 x86_64.

That makes me quite happy to hear that. To me, that means that PixInsight will continue to be developed for Linux. Linux definitely has a tonne of FOSS programs that typically surpass a lot of commercial applications on closed source operating systems, but true commercial support of Linux for end user applications is important. I'm not terribly thrilled with Software Bisque's new fee schedule for TheSkyX, but that they are looking to provide a Linux version is very promising. Now they just need to provide CCDSoft for Linux too

I use Mac OS X quite a lot, mainly because I really like it as a user, although I absolutely hate OS X for software development. I carry out all Mac OS X development via SSH from my main Linux workstation (Fedora 11).

OS X is pretty hard to beat; bsd underneath and a pretty refined gui on top. That and extensive commercial support. I've been using Linux for work related tasks for about 10 years now, but I was running MacOS 7.1 before then. I'd love an 8 core PowerMac to run OSX on top of, but I think I'll still with Linux until I truly need a home workstation upgrade. 

/home/cbaron/PixInsight/bin/./PixInsight: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libxml2.so.2: undefined symbol: gzopen64
Sorry for that Chris. I'll include libxml2.so in the bin/lib directory of all PI's Linux distributions to avoid these problems.

Thanks Juan. That would help me out here, but I'd still be handcuffed by the glibc version anyway so I'm either going to have to upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 upon release or give Fedora 13 a shot.

Fedora's a bit bleeding edge on a machine I rely heavily on at the office.

IMO this doesn't happen anymore after Fedora 8 or so. Fedora 11 and 12 are really solid operating systems that you can rely on (I personally find Fedora 11 a somewhat better distribution than 12). I use Fedora on all my development machines and I have absolutely no problem.

Now you've got me tempted to give the Fedora 13 beta a shot. I'd try Core 11 but support for older versions only lasts for 2 versions i.e. Fedora 11 support stops 1 month after Fedora 13's release.

consider that it is released in 5 OS flavours (if including 32/64 bits)
A port to FreeBSD is also planned during 2010. Call me mad  8)

Mad? Hardly. I'd call you genius. There aren't as many folks running FreeBSD as there are Linux, but the ones that do love it.  The fact that PixInsight runs everywhere means anyone can run it. Consequently the chances of people adopting PixInsight as their primary astrophotography processing software is far greater. Nobody else is offering a similarly polished processing package out there.

If you can just find time to contribute to Ascom X.....

Cheers,
Chris

[Tony Morris]

Hi Juan

Just upgraded to Ubuntu 10.04 - 64bit (painless for me!) and installed the latest PI 1.6.
I am now suffering from the same issue as Niall et all.
ldd (Ubuntu EGLIBC 2.11.1-0ubuntu7) 2.11.1
When I launch PI again after the crash, I get the message:-
"A previous instance of the PixInsight Core application crashed.
Reusing instance slot #1"
Downgraded to PI1.05.09 and all is well again!
Not having any issues with any other applications - so far

Thanks
Tony

[Juan Conejero]

Hi Tony,

AFAIK, there's no reason for PixInsight 1.6 not working on Ubuntu 10.

To try to diagnose the problem, I need more specific information. If you open a console, cd to the bin directory where you have installed PixInsight (e.g. ~/PixInsight/bin), and run the core application with this command:

./PixInsight.sh

What error messages do you see on the console?

[Tony Morris]

Juan
Re-installed 1.6 will full reset

Terminal output=
tony@tony-desktop:~/Pixinsight/bin$ ./PixInsight.sh

** A previous instance of the PixInsight Core application crashed.
Reusing instance slot #2.

PixInsight Core 01.06.00.0592 (x86_64)
Copyright (C) 2003-2010 Pleiades Astrophoto

If I relaunch the instance slot increments

Tony

[Carlos Milovic]

Hey Tony
Check the thread started by Chris, informing of a workaround to get PI 1.6 work on Lucid Lynx. The problem is on the libz libraries. Just move them (PCL/bin/lib) to another site.

[Tony Morris]

Carlos

Excellent--
I moved libz.so.1 and I can now open files with no problems. Thanks

There is still a minor problem though, looking at the conversation regarding GUI Effects
If I go to preferences- and click on Style Sheet/Special effects it locks up the preferences window

But at least the temp fix has got me working

Thanks again

Tony