NewsForge: Enjoying NASA’s Maestro on Your Linux Desktop

“I decided to download Maestro, the software NASA uses to
control the Mars rover Spirit, right after reading about the
project on Slashdot last week. Thousands of others were doing the
same thing, so given the size of the download–more than 45
megabytes–and the speed of the transfer from the mirror I
selected, I decided to leave it running and go to bed. Once it
finished, it was easy to get running, and the results were out of
this world.

“Here’s how easy it was to install and begin using on Linux.
First of all, don’t even begin unless you have the Java runtime on
your system. On my Mandrake 9.2 desktop, JRE 1.4.2_01 was already
in place. Your mileage may vary depending on the flavor of Linux
you’re running. Here’s one place you can get the Java runtime
environment (JRE) if you don’t already have it installed…”

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