In order to successfully run KStars, you need KDE >=2.1 and Qt™>=2.2.4. It may run on KDE 2.0 (and a similarly deprecated Qt™), but this has not been tested. If you try, please contact us with the results (success or failure)!
To compile KStars, you will also have to have the following packages installed:
Autoconf 2.5 is (apparently) incompatible with the files generated by KDevelop. (This incompatibility is expected to be resolved when KDE 3.0 is released).On my system, KStars uses about 50 MB of system memory with the default settings. Most of this usage is due to the loaded object databases, especially the 40,000-member stars database. You can dramatically reduce the memory footprint by reducing the faint limit for stars in the Configuration Window. If KStars is idling, it uses very little CPU; but it will use as much as you've got when panning or zooming.