openuniverse for Debian
----------------------

Openuniverse is not actively being maintained since the year 2000. In its
current state it works in some systems but not in others (see below known
issues with some video cards).  Openuniverse might be removed from the archive
in the future (it was and has been restored)

Users interested in Astronomy simulation software are encouraged to use
Celestia (https://celestia.space/). Unfortunately, Celestia is not packaged in
Debian but Debian packages are available and provided upstream. If you are
really interested in Debian providing Astronomy software you are encouraged to
work in providing and maintaining Debian packages for Celestia. 

In order for Openuniverse to work, you might want to tweak
/etc/openuniverse.conf to adjust for your 3d video card (it's optimised for a
GeForce card).  Please send new configurations you create to
openuniverse@packages.debian.org indicating the video card you are using.


NDIVIA Issues
-------------

Some users have reported issues when running with Nvidia cards.  Unfortunately,
the Debian maintainer cannot debug these issues but it is not all too clear if
they are due to a driver issue, to a library OU uses or to Openuniverse itself.

Since there is no upstream maintainer developing the software anymore, it is
not expected that these bugs will be resolved unless a user contributes
patches. The Debian maintainer will not be able to solve these issues and bugs
reported from users related to Nvidia (or other 3D cards) will most likely not
be fixed.

For reference see:

- Bug "#101498: Doesn't start"  http://bugs.debian.org/101498
- Bug "#107044: starts and dies", http://bugs.debian.org/107044 
- Bug "#986176: openuniverse runs with crippled GUI, then crashes" (https://bugs.debian.org/986176)


There have also been reports of users with some Ndvia cards/configurations
which work ok (reported: nvidia-glx 1.0.2313-1, a TNT2, and 
linux kernel 2.4.17)

If you can help debug out this bug many users would really 
appreciate it.

SCREENSHOTS
-----------

Screenshots are taken and stored at /var/games/openuniverse/scrshots. Notice
that the Debian package will not provide permissions for all users to 
write in that directory (and will not make the openuniverse program setgid
since it has not been security audited). If you want to let all the
users in the system to make screenshots when using openuniverse (and acknowledge
the security issues related to the partition containing /var being filled up)
do the following:

$ chmod a+rwx /var/games/openuniverse/scrshots
$ chmod +t /var/games/openuniverse/scrshots

(i.e. set it up as a temporary directory where all users can write to)

More information in the manpage (openuniverse(1)) in the section "FILES"


 -- Javier Fernandez-Sanguino Pena <jfs@computer.org>
 Sun, 05 Sep 2021 13:38:16 +0200
