Running Gaia Sky¶

If you installed the software using an installer or a package manager system (rpm, deb), you just need to use the standard running procedures of your Operating System to run the application.

Windows

In windows, this means clicking on Start and then browsing the start menu folder Gaia Sky. You can run the executable from there.

Linux

Just type gaiasky in a terminal or use your favourite desktop environment search engine to run the Gaia Sky launcher.

macOS X

Locate the launcher in your install directory (usually /Applications) and double click on it.

Code and pakcage

However, if you are a maverick and do not like installers, you can also run the Gaia Sky directly from the source code in GitHub or using the tgz package.

Running from source¶

Requirements¶

If you want to compile the source code, you will need the following:

JDK8 or above

Please, be aware that only tags are guaranteed to work (here). The master branch holds the development version and the configuration files are possibly messed up and not ready to work out-of-the-box. So remember to use a tag version if you want to run it right away from source.

Also, this guide is for Unix-like systems only. If you are working on Windows, you will need git for windows, which contains a version of MinGW (bash) packed with git, vim and some other utils. All other parts of the process should work the same under Windows systems.

First, clone the repository:

$  git clone https://github.com/langurmonkey/gaiasky.git
$  cd gaiasky

Getting the catalog data¶

The TGAS catalog files (Gaia data) are not in the repository, so if you want to use TGAS when running from source you need to download the tar file corresponding to your version — see table below.

As of version 1.5.0, there are new GPU-bound catalogs which perform much better and can also be combined with the levels-of-detail structure to produce a good combo in terms of performance and load times. Choose which catalog you want to use. Usually, the single file GPU version should work fine (tgas GPU), and has no culling, so all particles are visible at all times.

For versions 1.0.x just extract the package in the specified location. For versions 1.5.0+ you can choose whether you want to use the Levels of detail catalog (LoD, multiple files, uses an octree structure which culls particles outside the view frustum and hides particles which are far away according to the view distance setting) or the regular catalog (single file, loaded once at startup, contains the full catalog, which is sent to GPU memory). Then, you need to point the key data.json.catalog in your $HOME/.gaiasky/global.properties file to the file specified in the last column in the table.

Albeit not recommended for performance reasons, the legacy particle-based (CPU-bound) version of the catalog (version 1.0.4) can still be used with newer versions. To do so, extract the package in gaiasky/assets/data/octree/tgas so that the metadata.bin file and the particles folder are directly within that folder and edit the configuration file so that data.json.catalog points to data/catalog-tgas-hyg-lod-old.json.

Compiling and running¶

To compile the code and run Gaia Sky run the following.

$  gradlew core:run

In order to pull the latest changes from the GitHub repository:

$  git pull

Remember that the master branch is the development branch and therefore intrinsically unstable. It is not guaranteed to always work.

Packaging Gaia Sky¶

Gaia Sky can be exported to a folder to be run as a standalone app with the following.

$ gradlew core:dist

That will create a new folder called releases/gaiasky-[version].[revison] with the exported application. Run scripts are provided with the name gaiasky (Linux, macOS) and gaiasky.cmd (Windows).

Also, to export Gaia Sky into a tar.gz archive file, run the following.

$  gradlew core:createTar

In order to produce the desktop installers for the various systems you need a licensed version of Install4j. Then, you need to run:

$  gradlew core:pack

These command will produce the different OS packages (.exe, .dmg, .deb, .rpm, etc.) of Gaia Sky into releases/packages-[version].[revision] folder.

Running from downloaded package¶

If you prefer to run the application from the tar.gz package, follow the instructions below.

Linux¶

In order to run the application on Linux, open the terminal, uncompress the archive, give execution permissions to the gaiasky script and then run it.

$  tar zxvf gaiasky-[version].tar.gz
$  cd gaiasky-[version]/
$  gaiasky

Windows¶

In order to run the application on Windows, open a terminal window (type cmd in the start menu search box) and run the gaiasky.cmd file.

$  cd path_to_gaiasky_folder
$  gaiasky.cmd

macOS X¶

To run the application on macOS, follow the instructions in the Linux section.