Well, this has been an interesting ride.

About five years ago, I heard about INDI, and it sounded like a path out of Windows, and in particular, sounded like a great way to use my Mac for astronomy, natively (my observatory runs in a VMWare Fusion VM at the moment). At the time, it felt like there was just not enough device support to justify trying to switch.

This time out, it looked like there was a lot more device support, great job everyone, so I decided to give INDI a go on OSX.

After two weeks of fighting Homebrew, Fink, Qt, and KDE, I'm ready to quit again, for now.

In the end, I got INDI 1.2.0 and Kstars 2.5.0 (compiled under KDE 5.16.0 and Qt 5.5.1) running on OSX 10.10.5. I never quite got all the icons working in Ekos. I couldn't get the indi_qhy_ccd driver to build on the Mac, so I tried both Astroberry 1.0, and the latest Raspberry Pi daily builds (the RPi stuff was on a RPi 2 running Raspbian Jessie), where it built, but was unable to connect reliably to either my SSAG or QHY5-IIL.

I felt like I was a couple a moving parts away from a 100% Mac solution in the observatory, and was setting up to write a port of Lesvedome (K8055 based dome under ASCOM) as an INDI driver.

Perhaps this all just works out of the box on Linux, but I'm feeling like we are still "not quite there yet" on OSX, and so I will just put this project back on the shelf and go back to ASCOM for now. Maybe I will try again in a few years, when Windows starts wearing on me again.

For the record, the only reason I am running KDE on the Mac is to run Kstars, which, after all, is part of the KDE Education package.

A suggestion to someone with a little time on their hands, write a small utility that will enumerate all of the "full names" on a given INDI server. Trying to glean that info from log files was the second-to-last straw.

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