OaCapture alongside Kstars (Linux Mint 20)

[BargeGazer]

I'm fighting my laptop again and have had to resort to a full reinstall of Linux Mint.

I have got Kstars working, apparenlty correctly, with all the indi components installed, including QHY drivers.

Trying to install oacapture from the latest source and it insists on removing all indi and Kstars instances.

Similarly if I let oacapture remove these instances then when I reinstall them Oacapture is removed.

Obviously I am doing something stupid as I had them working together some months ago before having to rebuild everything.

Many thanks for any help.

David

[MarkAR]

Not sure if this helps at all but Astroberry has both, might be a clue somewhere to get both working alongside each other.

[BargeGazer]

Mark, Yes I have looked at that but my Linux knowledge gets a bit iffy to diagnose from one to the other. I am sure I am just being stupid somewhere.

[JamesF]

Which release of oacapture are you using?

James

[BargeGazer]

James.

the version I am using is 1.7.0-1 amd64 from the Ubuntu 20.04 section of openastroproject.

I am running Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana), MATE.

David

[JamesF]

Hmmm.  If all the INDI stuff is installed already then it should be possible to install just the oacapture package and nothing else.  The libraries should be there from INDI and oacapture should find and use them.  At least, that was the intention.  It could be that it doesn't work that way on all environments for some reason.  I have a machine running Mint 20 somewhere (not got around to updating my desktop yet), so I'll give it a try.  I think there was a new release of Kstars etc. in the last few days, so I can test that at the same time.

It is a bit of a messy situation at the moment   Ideally the kit manufacturers would produce installable versions of their own libraries, but as they don't we (myself, Jasem and anyone else who wants to package their astro application up nicely) have to do that work ourselves and clashes are almost inevitable.

James

[JamesF]

Ok, it looks to me as though it should work if you install Kstars, INDI etc. and then just install the oacapture package without any of the others.  That's definitely the place to start, anyhow.

James

[BargeGazer]

Thanks James

That is how I tried it but I'll try re-installing it all from scratch. Would Ubuntu be a better base to start from than Mint. I am building this laptop up as an Astro-only machine. It is not exactly the latest and hottest machine though.

David

 

[JamesF]

42 minutes ago, BargeGazer said:

That is how I tried it but I'll try re-installing it all from scratch. Would Ubuntu be a better base to start from than Mint. I am building this laptop up as an Astro-only machine. It is not exactly the latest and hottest machine though.

Very odd.  I tested using Mint 20 and it worked ok for me.

James

[BargeGazer]

Thanks. I'll just try it all again.

David

[BargeGazer]

James,

I'm sorry to be a pain in the proverbial but I am clearly doing something wrong.  If you could give any advice I would be indebted to you.

Complete clean install of Mint Ulyana and update.

installation of Indi and KStars via:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:mutlaqja/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install indi-full kstars-bleeding

Then downloaded oacapture from oacapture_1.7.0-1_amd64.deb under Ubuntu 20

Then using GDebi package manager I get the attached screenshot

I tried both before and after running Kstars with the same effect.

Do you have any idea where I am going off the rails?

David

 

[JamesF]

Oh, now that's not nice.  I think this is almost certainly down to a clash between libraw19 and libraw20.  I've just checked on my system and when I upgraded INDI it didn't upgrade libgphoto or libpentax which are the two libraries requiring libraw20 and left me with just libraw19 installed which is why it worked for me.

I don't have a solution for this at the moment I'm afraid.  It may be that I can work around it by changing the configuration for the oacapture build, but it may be a wider problem.  For example it appears that gimp depends on a library that has a dependency on libraw19, so it's possible (and I don't know without doing further tests) that installing the latest INDI means you can't install gimp on the same machine.

It may be that if you install from scratch, then install the libgegl package and then install Kstars/INDI that the packaging system will just drop libgphoto and libpentax thereby avoiding the problem, but that is just a guess.  I can give it a try later.

James

[MCinAZ]

Unless there's something in Mint 20 that's not in Mint 19, perhaps things would go more smoothly with the earlier release. Mint 19, like Ubuntu 18.04, will be fully supported for a while yet, which will allow time for the developers and package maintainers to catch up with all the new libraries.

I've reinstalled since, but I'm pretty sure I had oacapture-1.7.0 and INDI/Ekos/KStars installed on this machine previously when I was considering a move from Mint to Ubuntu. That was an 18.04 installation. I didn't see any issues with library conflicts (though I have to say, I found KStars to be quite disappointing. But that's a rant for a different day.)

[JamesF]

I'm not sure any earlier OS version would help either, unfortunately

I suspect it's because of a libraw version clash between the version in the release of Kstars/INDI that was made last week and the version in the main Ubuntu/Mint distribution.  I'm not sure it's possible to check now, but I believe the previous Kstars/INDI release used the same version of libraw as Ubuntu/Mint.  Unfortunately I don't think the older release is available to download once the newer one is made.

I'm tinkering with some installations in virtual machines at the moment to try to understand the underlying problem better.

James

[JamesF]

Well, that didn't take very long...

The way it looks to me is that the problem is down to a mishandling of the INDI indi-gphoto and indi-pentax packages that require libraw20 when the OS only provides libraw19.  Where an attempt is made to install either of those two packages, it works fine as long as  there is nothing already installed that requires the older version.  If there is however, depending on how exactly you're doing the installation those packages (which include gimp and shotwell as well as oacapture) will be removed, or the installation will just fail.  And the same thing will happen the other way around if you try to install those packages after INDI.  I believe that if there's a need for a later version of the libraw library than is provided in the main distribution then it should have been made private to the applications that require it.  (That is the approach I took with oacapture, in fact.)

So, I'm going to call it an INDI bug.

I'm just trying to think of how we might work around it.

James

[JamesF]

Turns out there's a thread about this problem here:

https://indilib.org/forum/general/7563-libraw19-and-libraw20-conflict-in-1-8-6.html

(Do read to the end first if you're starting to think one of the workarounds might work for you.)

The way it reads at the moment, Jasem appears to be all but saying "Yes, I broke other applications because I couldn't get INDI to build otherwise".

James

Edited August 26, 2020 by JamesF

[JamesF]

I've asked in that thread if there's any way to install a previous release.  I think I can see a way to do it, but it involves downloading all the necessary packages individually, which is a major slog given that there are sixty-four in all.  Hopefully someone knows an easier way.

James

[JamesF]

Someone has proposed a fix for the INDI build system in the above thread, so hopefully it will work and there'll be a new release of INDI out shortly to make the problem go away.

James