Looks nice, unfortunately not straight forward to test on Ubuntu due to the libqt5datavisualization5 module not being packaged even in 17.10 (bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1727617).
Yeah most likely this would be for those on 18.04+
EDIT: It's not even in 18.04 when I checked today.. so I commented on this bug. Those who have Launchpad account please login and comment as well so it brings more attention to this.
Built kstars from source last night and spent the evening guiding with EKOS/PHD2 and it worked really well - I appreciate the improvements you've made!
That’s good to hear! I have not yet used it in its final version under the real sky due to the full moon and the weather. It has been below freezing for more than 2 weeks and there is significant snowfall. That plus the holidays. I hope to get it out soon, but until then I am working on the 3D star profile. It is almost done!
So that is related to the star image that comes back from PHD2. PHD2 sends a small star image back every single time it does a Guide Step. So what I did is I saved the file as a FITS file and then opened it in the FitsView. Then you can see the images that are coming in. It is a very small file, so doesn't take up lots of resources or take long to save or open. But if we let it just make a temp file with whatever name it wants, very soon you will have hundreds or even thousands of temp files. So I am saving it with a predictable name that we can then overwrite so it doesn't fill up your hard drive with PHD guide images.
In terms of your issue, does the star image appear when guiding? Sometimes some frames are lost because they get corrupted in the file transfer due to the way PHD2 sends them. But are you seeing the star at all? If not, then I would ask if the file path /tmp/kstars/phd2.fits exists on your computer. Can you check that?
Ok, well at least you are getting enough of them to see what the star is doing. I can try to cut down on the error messages.
In terms of the security issue, KStars should not be running as root (fortunately), and the exploit would only work if the user has access to your computer's files somehow in order to make a symlink in your tmp directory. The tmp directory is of course vulnerable due to its permissions, but unless you have multiple users on your computer at the same time, are using your imaging computer as an Internet or file server, or someone gets access to your keyboard, I doubt they can do it. Even if they did I'm not sure it would do much good since KStars does not run the file like an executable or a script, it reads the data bits in the file and renders it as an image. So if it tried to load a malicious file, it would probably just fail to load or render an image properly. Can someone let me know if I am wrong about this? Thanks!