KStars is an astronomy application for KDE. KStars gets its star data from catalogs of the stars published by various organizations doing research in astronomy. The USNO NOMAD is the largest such catalog as of now, and KStars supports a small fraction of this catalog, that is offered as a 1.4 GB download. Downloads in KStars work using KDE's framework called "KNewStuff". KNewStuff is rarely tested on data of such large sizes, and so there are quite a few errors.

We had a lot of bug reports about USNO NOMAD download and install failing. These were mostly upstream errors. We'd like to see if these bugs are still present in trunk.

Requisites: Lots of internet bandwidth, KDE built from trunk, patience. You may also use KDE 4.6 Release Candidates to do this test.

The idea is to see if USNO NOMAD is downloaded, installed and extracts properly.

To test, fire up KStars, go to the 'File' menu, select 'Download New Data'. Find Tycho-2 and USNO NOMAD. Ensure that you install Tycho-2, as this is a requisite for the USNO NOMAD (part) catalog. Select the USNO NOMAD (part) option. Test if it: a) Downloads with no errors, b) Extracts without errors, c) You see stars up to magnitude 16 when you zoom in (Zoom in to some part of the sky that is not close to Sagittarius, and right click on the tiniest star you see to find its magnitude).

If there is a problem, file a bug report with as much information as you can, on our bug tracker at bugs.kde.org