# Installation

## How to obtain &kstars;

&kstars; is distributed with &kde; as part of the kdeedu "Edutainment" module.

&kstars; is been packaged by many Linux/BSD distributions, including Fedora, openSUSE, Ubuntu, and Mandriva. Some distributions package &kstars; as a separate application, some just provide a kdeedu package, which includes &kstars;.

If you would like the latest Git development version of &kstars;, please follow these instructions.

## Requirements

In order to successfully run &kstars;, you need &kde; >=4.0 and &Qt;>=4.3.

To compile &kstars;, you will also have to have the following packages installed:

- kdelibs-devel

- qt-devel

- zlib-devel

- fam-devel

- png-devel

- jpeg-devel

- cmake

On my system, &kstars; uses about 60 MB of system memory with the default settings. Most of this usage is due to the loaded object databases. You can dramatically reduce the memory footprint by reducing the faint limit for stars in the Configuration Window, or eliminating catalogs of objects (NGC, IC, comets, asteroids, &etc;). If &kstars; is idling, it uses very little CPU; but it will use as much as you have got when panning or zooming.

## Compilation and Installation

&install.compile.documentation;

## Configuration

At this point, there are no special configuration options or requirements. If &kstars; complains that there are missing data files, become root and manually copy all files in `kstars/data/` to `$(KDEDIR)/apps/kstars/` (If you do not have root privileges, copy them to `~/.kde/share/apps/kstars/.`)