You're saying that kauth is in fact working and that the problem is not with kauth? When I was having this same problem, I changed permissions to /usr/share/astrometry to 777 and the problem went away. I'll try it again and report back.

John

I just ran some quick tests with /usr/share/astrometry permissions at 777 - So far from within ekos/align/options I've been able to download index-4204 through index-4213 and index-4107 through index 4113 with zero problems. In a terminal, nethogs was showing about 2.5 to 3 MB/sec throughput. While typing this, I started index-4203 and its moving along at about 2MB/sec. I allowed it to finish, which it did normally.
I can try these tests with /usr/share/astrometry at its default permissions (755) if that's of interest. Also, If it matters, this is an Ubuntu 16 VM with all the latest patches but not upgraded to 18. 4GB ram and 50gb disk

Yes, nightly and no, downloads don't take more than 15mins. I did a screen recording of what happens...

Can you run "Info Center" and let me know what is the KDE Frameworks Version used?

Did the same thing and with permissions set at 777 the download works flawlessly. KAuth doesn't even ask for a password. Obviously the files are owned by the user then which gives rise to the question why download the index files to /usr/share/astrometry in the first place. If you want to have them owned by the user they should be placed in a directory owned by the user anyway like ~/(.)astrometry

sure...

yeah, on Linux, I think it's a better idea to use a user owned directory since KAuth has so many issues.

Thanks everyone! I changed the ownership to myself and also changed the perms to 777 just for good measure.
Worked well enough for me to get all the files I needed.

PK

Ok, just committed to GIT new code that removes KAuth and stores the files on Linux to a local directory. Hopefully this resolves the KAuth issues, please test once the nightly is built.

Thank you, Jasem!

I pulled and it does download to ~/.local/share/kstars/astrometry/ now.
No KAuth issues anymore.
The line "add_path ~/.local/share/kstars/astrometry" should be added to /etc/astrometry.cfg
Solver -> Options -> Index Files -> Index Files Location still points towards /usr/share/astrometry.

Or was it intended to make users copy the files to the /usr/share/astrometry directory by hand after download?

we can't edit /etc/astrometry.cfg, or we'll back to KAuth again. It creates a new config file in ~/.local/share/kstars that is used when astrometry is running

It reads from both locations now. So if the user decides to download an index file, it is always downloaded to the local directory.

As it is now, we have two astrometry.cfg files. I became confused where to change the "inparallel" option (this thing in my head is not a brain, it's a sieve). I tried astrometry.cfg in ~/.local/share/kstars/astrometry/ and it did work. However, after deleting /etc/astrometry.cfg, Ekos complained about it. So I copied it back.

Is /etc/astrometry.cfg being used for anything, still? If the answer is no, shouldn't we get rid of it in order to prevent confusion?