From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: To: 9fans@9fans.net Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2008 19:21:56 -0400 From: john@csplan9.rit.edu In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Re: [9fans] scat, ngc2000 and other matters Topicbox-Message-UUID: 8cf38604-ead3-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 > Greetings all - > > Today I revisited Plan 9 after a long break (changed jobs, moved, etc) and > made some real progress. I'd been contemplating writing in about how slow > I found the system and my seeming inability to get networked, but I > decided instead to research the mailing list archives and got some of my > answers ... > > ... but. I confess that one of the things that drew me to Plan 9 was the > obvious inclusion, in the screenshot on the web page, of an astronomy > program. My thought must have been something along the lines of "an OS > that includes an astronomy program by default is an OS I want to know more > about." > > Therefore one of the first things I did when I managd to get the system > installed was fire up scat. I found it an interesting program (its name is > another matter ...) but ran into problems attempting to follow some of the > examples in the man page for the program. In short, a key database of > astro-objects, the NGC catalogue, appeared to be MIA. > > Sample output: > > ngc1300 > scat: NGC database not available > > (if I followed this with a command to look at another object with an NGC > number, the program would "suicide"). > > Today, since I got things to run at acceptable speeds, I decided to look > into this further. If I'm not mistaken, the problem is that the file > > /lib/sky/ncg2000.scat > > has nothing in it, e.g. is of zero size. > > Is there somewhere I can get a file that actually has data in it? Were > there licensing problems? Would love to know more about this. > > Thanks, > > Glenn > > +-----------------------------------------------------+ > Glenn Becker - burningc@sdf.lonestar.org > SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org > +-----------------------------------------------------+ >>From the scat man page: The Digitized Sky Survey, 102 CD-ROMs, is not distributed with the system. I had always assumed that was the reason. A 103-CD Plan 9 distro is not something I would enjoy. John