PixInsight 1.8.4.1198 for FreeBSD Released

[Juan Conejero]

Hi all,

We are proud to announce the release of a new version of PixInsight: 1.8.4.1198 for FreeBSD. Installation packages are now available to all users on our software distribution system.

This long-awaited release places PixInsight on equal terms in its four supported platforms: FreeBSD, Linux, OS X, and Windows. This release also shows the strength of our commitment with one of the best operating systems, of unparalleled stability and efficiency, where the word free really means freedom in the software development world.

How to Install the Release

This version is not available through the update system integrated with the PixInsight Core application. You have to download the appropriate installation package(s) for your platform(s) from our software distribution system:

   https://pixinsight.com/dist/

Once downloaded, uncompress the .tar.gz archive on a directory under your home directory, then run the installer program as root from a terminal. Answer "yes" to the confirmation question and you're done. The old version (if any) will be removed, and version 1.8.4.1198 will be installed on the /opt system directory by default, as usual. Graphical shortcuts will be created automatically on most X11 desktop environments, including KDE, GNOME, Lumina, Xfce and LXDE, among others.

See also FAQ Section 3 for important information about installations and updates.

This version has been fully developed and tested on PC-BSD 10.2 Joule Edition. It works nicely on an out-of-the-box PC-BSD 10.2 Desktop installation. However, please note that on a vanilla FreeBSD installation, the user is responsible to supply a complete and well configured X11 installation with working compositing extensions, a reasonably modern desktop manager such as KDE or GNOME, and a large number of complex dependencies required by the PixInsight Core application. These are not trivial tasks by any means. We strongly encourage using PC-BSD Desktop instead of a pure FreeBSD installation, unless you really know what you are doing and how to do it. Version 10.2 is also strongly recommended, since older FreeBSD versions are not guaranteed to work well with PixInsight.

Main Bug Fixes and New Features

Refer to the previous releases of versions 1.8.4.1195, 1.8.4.1197, and 1.8.4.1198 for Linux. This version for FreeBSD is a cumulative bugfix/update release. It is actually the best and most advanced version of PixInsight available as of the date of this announcement, since it includes some stability and performance improvements still not released on the rest of platforms.

Acknowledgments

This version of PixInsight would not have been possible without the work of the KDE team and other developers to make Qt 5.5.1 run on FreeBSD. I want to thank all these people for their great work. Such work, by the way, should have been driven by the Qt Company, but unfortunately they seem to have very little interest in FreeBSD, which is a shame.


I hope you enjoy this new release. Thank you all for your patience and continued support.

[Carlos Milovic]

Congratulations!

Since the KDE team was involved in this, should be expect some improvements in the Qt behavior for linux too?

[hectorbdn]

Good! looking forward for a version of PI which uses Nvidia CUDA! any news about that!??!!??! 

[Juan Conejero]

Good! looking forward for a version of PI which uses Nvidia CUDA! any news about that!??!!??! 

Now the question is: what has this to do with a FreeBSD version of PixInsight? 

[hectorbdn]

Good! looking forward for a version of PI which uses Nvidia CUDA! any news about that!??!!??! 

Now the question is: what has this to do with a FreeBSD version of PixInsight? 

Nothing? , just ... New versions are released and wanted to know if there is any new about that, is that wrong? I'm sorry

[EckyH]

Hereby I confirm that the new PixInsight version runs fine on a vanilla FreeBSD-10.2 installation with KDE 4.14.3.

Well done! 

E.

[Juan Conejero]

Hi Hector,

As a general rule, forum topics should stay on-topic as much as possible, and this is very especially true for official announcement topics.

Currently we have a lot of priorities before implementing GPU acceleration in PixInsight. I started exploring this in 2014, and then again in 2015, but soon realized that I'd better invest our scarce development resources and time in other development tasks that will provide much more added value to the platform. Right now I cannot say anything more precise. We have a lot of work to do in the development and documentation fronts, among others.

[Juan Conejero]

Hereby I confirm that the new PixInsight version runs fine on a vanilla FreeBSD-10.2 installation with KDE 4.14.3.

Well done! 

E.

Thank you!

[hectorbdn]

Hi Hector,

As a general rule, forum topics should stay on-topic as much as possible, and this is very especially true for official announcement topics.

Currently we have a lot of priorities before implementing GPU acceleration in PixInsight. I started exploring this in 2014, and then again in 2015, but soon realized that I'd better invest our scarce development resources and time in other development tasks that will provide much more added value to the platform. Right now I cannot say anything more precise. We have a lot of work to do in the development and documentation fronts, among others.

OK, I understand and I'm sorry, I'm just particularly interested in the cuda development because my CPU is very old but my GPU  are not, anyways thank you very much for your answer

Greetings from.Barcelona

Hector

[Carlos Milovic]

As I understand (I listened to this information on a Podcast; I'm going to meet the expert in a few days and then I'm going to ask her again), in the current state there is a huge bottleneck in the process of copying the information into the GPU. So, for large images, any speed gain due to the process power is lost due to the time needed in the transmission. This, for OpenGL and Python. Not sure how this is translated to other languages and CUDA.