Hi. I thought it might be nice for people to have a place to give me feedback on the Planets. I know there are some people who've had problems installing on Windows (or who have simply been annoyed that they have to download Tcl/Tk to even use the damn thing.)

Anyway, I'd like to hear feedback, good and bad.

Dear author.

I am a danish teacher in fysics, and I have tested the programe whith my class (After spending 1,5 hour playing whith it because it was fun).
I used the Linux version.
I have the following comments:

- My pupils liked it very much.

- As a teacher in Denmark I would like to be able to translate the program into Danish - Pleace use gettext or another way of easy translation.

- Would it be possible to make a kind of handbook that told a bit about graviation, Newtons and Keplers laws and the link to real planet behavior? (Look at the Kstars handbook http://kstars.sourceforge.net/handbook/index.html for an example).
That would make it even more usefull in education.

- As you don't have any menubar (witch is great) you need another way of telling the users how to get the fun startet. I would sugest a kind of splash screen (Although I normaly hate them) telling the commands to get started and to get help.

- I woud like a way to install the programe in binary form, so all users can use the program. Are you thinking of making a RPM- and DEB-package?

I am looking very much forward to translating your programe into Danish.

Gunner Poulsen.
E-mail mailto:gp@lyngbjerggaardskolen.dk

Thanks for the feedback.

The translations, the packaging and the initial-help screen are all good ideas that I'll look into and try to get done soon.

Hi, I havent tried it yet, but it is something that I was thionking about making myself. Anyway, I wanted to know if you could me a Windows version that is staticlly link with TK, that would make me happier right of the bat. I'm going to reboot to linux and try it out now.
Oh also, I would like to see "The Science, Physics and Math Behind Planets". If you give me a head start on the info I could help out.

Statically linking to Tcl/Tk would be nice, but Tcl/Tk is a big beast, and I don't know that there is a good way of doing such a static linking.

I'm not sure a manual describing the inner workings of planets would be of much interest except to someone who is interested in modifying the source code, which I am very much in favor of. This is particularly true because planets doesn't really do anything terribly interesting in terms of the physical simulation. It's just a dumb, 1st-order approximation.

If you'd like to know more about the details of planets, I'd be glad to tell you about it. And if it results in an interesting document, I'll post it to the site. Perhaps you should email me directly (yminsky@cs.cornell.edu), and tell me something about your background, so I get a sense of what you do and don't know about the material, and pitch my explanation accordingly.

No luck with binaries. Cygwin error is --> Syntax error: "(" unexpected. Problem with my cygwin installation, perhaps? I don't know. This is on NT.

Mandrake Linux 8.1 no-go also. Planets wants libtk.so.0. The rpm Find site suggests that this comes from a RedHat package. Enough dependency issues that I'll hold off until my Mandrake installation is up-dated.
Of course I could try compiling....

Edited by author 02-20-2002 05:13 PM
Yet another reason why we need LSB-compliant distributions.

I can't explain the problem with the windows distribution -- it's certainly not something I've seen before. There's a somewhat newer version of the windows binary linked from the website (0.1.4. Up until 5 minutes ago, 0.1.3 was the one linked to from the web page.) You might want to try downloading that one. Tell me if you have any luck.

As for mandrake, I'm a little saddened to hear that it doesn't work. It's unfortunate that distributions are so non-uniform. Anyway, I encourage you to build it from source. You do need a recent (3.04) installation of ocaml, but if you've got that, building it is cake. Just type "make planets".

Regarding cygwin, my silly, dumb error. I took the Freshmeat version of planets and expect that to run on Windows. Hence the error. Windows version does rather better. Fun program, judging from what little experimenting I did. Thank you. Thank you as well for good, informative error checking re any missing tcl.dll or whatever. And apologies for the false alarm.

Mandrake Linux? Well, I've ocaml loaded now. About time, you might say. I'm no programmer, really; but peaking at ocaml documentation has been on the agenda. Unfortunately, planets would not compile. Could be my set-up. The error statement was:
ocamlopt.opt -I +labltk -pp "camlp4o pa_ifdef.cmo" unix.cmxa str.cmxa labltk.cmxa libjpf.cmxa -inline 50 -cclib -lunix -c augSet.ml
sh: camlp4o: command not found
Preprocessing error
make: *** [augSet.cmx] Error 2

If you have suggestions, I would be pleased to try again. Then again, if Madrake Soft would give it a go, that would be the better test.

Glad to hear that the Windows version works for you.

As for Mandrake, in order to compile, you need ocaml 3.04, which comes with camlp4 included. Probably the usual mandrake package is an earlier version of ocaml.

And I do encourage you to take a peak at ocaml. It's a lovely language. Although it does have its own warts (slighly clunky syntax being one), it is both fast and full of high-level language features that make programming a lot of fun, once you get the swing of the whole functional programming and type-inference thing.

Actually, it is the 3.04 version of ocaml that is installed (from Mandrake Cooker). I guess that we will have to get after Mandrake. I have another question to raise with them anyway. I've other stuff to attend to now but will get back to this.