I just installed the latest Xephem-3.7.1 onto my debian amd64. The problem with the default deb package in the Debian repository is that the version is quite old, at 3.4.5. Unfortunately, building Xephem-3.7.1 isn't quite straightforward; here's a small howto to craft the binaries (no package, unfortunately) :


* download the source from the Xephem site
* unpack the tgz tarball
* create and run this script in the ./xephem-3.7.1 directory :

#!/bin/bash

# Fix gcc flags

for i in libastro/Makefile libip/Makefile  

 libjpegd/Makefile liblilxml/Makefile GUI/xephem/Makefile ; 

do

  echo "Fixing CFLAGS in ${i}"

  sed -e "s~^CFLAGS[ ]*=(.*)-O2(.*)~CFLAGS= 1 2  

  ${CFLAGS}~" -i ${i} 
done

sed -e 's~^CFLAGS[ ]*=(.*)$(CLDFLAGS)(.*)~CFLAGS=1 2~'  

  -i GUI/xephem/Makefile

* Remove the ./xephem-3.7.1/libXm/linux86 directory, as it contains 32bit libraries
* Create a symlink ./xephem-3.7.1/libXm/linux86 towards /usr/lib
* Install the lesstif2 and lesstif2-dev packages
* Build as described in the INSTALL file


That's it ! Copy your binary to /usr/bin, and you're ready to rumble.