It's been a rough week. When it began I had high hopes of getting FireCapture working. That didn't go so well, and then KStars/Ekos Align suddenly couldn't plate-solve, dashing my hopes of using it to align on a planet, and then observing it with FireCapture. In trying to debug that I noticed that my camera was only returning green images. I suspected something wrong with camera, but that doesn't seem completely likely. It could also be software. So here I am with my Pi connected but no equipment connected to it. Trying to look at KStars and INDI log files for clues. Suddenly my keyboard within the Pi/Astroarch has gone flaky! Most keys do nothing on some of the screens within Astroarch. Upon reboot, they work - for awhile. Earlier, I had noticed an occasional condition where the Caps Lock key within noVNC and astroarch would become reversed. So, could it be my Pi that is damaged? Perhaps the data on my Micro-SD card? I am losing my mind here. There is no rock upon which I can stand.

Since I learned that ZWO won't issue an RMA without verifying the problem with their ASIStudio, my next plan is to run that through my laptop on a Windows partition, hook the laptop directly to my camera (NOT my usual mode of operation). There is a linux version of ASIStudio but it installs with a .run file that probably shouldn't be trusted. Taking the Pi out of it will at least resolve doubts about the camera.

Have established that it isn't the camera. Something with my system on the Pi, either hardware or software. Figuring it out is the next step, May reload system.

Hello Steve

I am writing to you on this thread rather than the one "Kstars 3.6.8 and INDI 2.0.5 released" which seems to me more dedicated to the new releases from Kstars and INDI libraries.

Did you do a 'paru -Syu' update?
If so, did the issues appear after the update?
Concerning Kstars/INDI have you tried a downgrade to the previous version?

It may be interesting to separate the problems to determine the causes.
On the one hand Kstars the plate solving and the camera. And on the other hand, hardware issues like the keyboard which can come from the Linux kernel or hardware.

Thanks very much for suggesting what, at first glance, seems the most likely culprit. No. I did,not do a paru -Syu update, but I did use paru to load Firecapture itself, right before at least most of the problems occurred. I'd like to say before "all" the problems occurred but I believe the first instances of the CapsLock key getting weird were before that.

My post indilib.org/forum/astro-arch/14121-insta...re-on-astroarch.html went up on December 12, after I was thrilled to have found a way to install FireCapture.

That post listed in step 1:
sudo pacman -Syu jdk-openjdk and this, I recall updated more than 100 packages. I suppose one of them could have upset things.

In step 4, I used paru:
paru -U firecapture-2.7.14-1-aarch64.pkg.tar.zst
but not with the -Syu switch

Then there were a couple of nights trying to use Firecapture.
Troubles with Polar Alignment failures began on December 15:
"PAA: Stopping, solver failed too many times."

I think this is roughly in the time frame where something I did in the FireCapture installation process could have caused the problem.

There was no new KStars installation in that sequence. I still haven't installed KStars 3.6.8 or INDI 2.0.5 so those are not the problem.

I think I am going to try reimaging my SD card with the last official release, put back the gps stuff we did the other day, and see if then I have a usable system.

Thanks again for the suggestion.

I am still a bit concerned about the keyboard issues.

... and I'm not going to mess with Firecapture again until it's integrated into a solid release.

I see that you did not update the packages before installing FireCapture. It is recommended on ArchLinux to always do a complete update before installing or determining the source of a problem.

Doing a "paru -Syu" could perhaps fix your issues or at least determine that the system is up-to-date before any guesswork.

Oh, man, seems like I completely misunderstood your post by 180 degrees. I thought you were saying that running paru during the Firecapture install process was problematic. In reality, you were saying the opposite. I SHOULD have run paru -Syu first.
Well, too late now. I’m rebuilding the system from scratch.

It's not a problem. Next time, don't forget to do a system update with paru -Sy as a minimum and paru -Syu for a global update.

Hi guys, I know firecapture brings in its own dev rules which usually breaks my devrules as they are setup to work on other paths and use older software I replace with newer one (QHY and fxload)

You could try to drop from /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/ the rules setup by firecapture (I believe they have a fc in the name)

Also, not less important, avoid running pacman -Syu if you haven't upgrade in a long time, they keyring may break and you need to update it first before proceeding. The one and only way I'd suggest to users is to run update-astroarch that will update all deps but will refresh first the keyring to avoid falling in the failing pgp keys pit

I am almost done with packaging firecapture, should come after xmas

Steve, have you tried to rollback kstars and indi with the command astro-rollback-full the check it is the system and not the new version?

I had not recently installed a new version of KStars before I started experiencing these problems. I was running 3.6.7 and it was working as expected. It may have been all the stuff I did to get FireCapture loaded that caused the problem. I have since installed 3.6.8 and it doesn't not seem to have made anything worse. Tonight will be the first clear night in a few so I will get back to it.