John D installed Celestia on several attendees computers. It is a really neat astronomy program. We attempted to install Redhat on a HP notebook without success. John D connected his kiosk server to a hub and others could use the kiosk thru the hub, nice work John. Attendees were able to check out Ximian's new XD-2 version of Gnome desktop.

Celestia is a great multi-platform 3D astronomy program that allows the user to tour the solar system and universe. It may usefull in the museum. I encourage everyone to install it, play with it, and see what we can do with it. The user can write scripts for custom demos; and I put one together that tours the solar system. It looks impressive on a PC with good graphics capability. I installed Celestia in Red Hat 9 and Windows 98 SE; and it works great. The main site is: http://www.shatters.net/celestia/ . The Red Hat rpm is available at: http://freshrpms.net/ . It needs gtkglarea which I got with apt. It's sluggish on the cclug pentium 233, so if someone could put it on a fast PC for the next meeting, that would be great. Teacher Frank Gregorio has a Celestia lesson plan for students. If you're interested in using Celestia as part of a science class or demostration, or if you'd just like a good introduction to using Celestia, then download the lesson plan. The Documents are in MS Word format. -JD

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