Version: (using KDE 3.5.9) Installed from: Debian testing/unstable Packages I simply forward Debian bug #498248 [0]: Hello, now that I bought an OpenMoko FreeRunner mobile phone, and it has a GPS, I would like to be able to run a sky map software on it, so that I can go out in the night and automatically see a map of the sky over my head. On the FreeRunner, kstars takes about 6 minutes to start, and loading things such as the city list is probably not required if the position can be found through the GPS. Afterwards the refresh time is 1 second, although 5 minutes would probably be more than enough. Scrolling is so slow/lagging that I cannot even figure out if it happens by dragging or by clicking. The Settings dialog is truncated on the right (the screen is 480x640, and the right side of the Settings dialog ends up outside of the screen) Would it be hard to have a lightweight / embedded mode with a simplified interface that could be made to work in small devices? [0] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=498248
To answer your question, yes it would be hard to make a lightweight KStars. Unless someone steps it, I doubt anyone in the current development team is going to pick up this task.
KStars running on ARM PC (http://maxchen.im/tinyastro/)