FlightGear Newsletter May 2015: Difference between revisions

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Users hamzaalloush and saiarcot895 have been making lots of progress using [http://mxe.cc/ MXE] and [http://www.mingw.org/ MinGW] to build Windows binaries on Linux.  The goal is to provide FlightGear/osgEarth binaries for Windows end-users via cross-compiling on Linux, so that end-users no longer need to be able to build FlightGear from source, but can just download pre-compiled binaries for different FlightGear versions.  As of May 2015, OpenSceneGraph and osgEarth can be cross-compiled and run most of their respective examples:

Currently, people primarily familiar with building FlightGear from source and ideally also using git are invited to join to efforts. Having access to Linux and/or Windows to help with testing or developing these cross-compiled binaries is also very helpful. People familiar with CMake, the GNU build system, or GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) internals are also invited to help. In addition To show your interest, please leave your system specs (OS, distribution) on the [http://forum.flightgear.org/viewtopic.php?p=244898#p244898 forum thread] so a list can be made of people familiar with both Linux and Windows (alternatively, emulation/virtualization via VirtualBox/Qemu, etc.), although for now we are primarily looking for people familiar with building FG from source, and ideally also familiar with using git.  

Note that most testing/development is currently taking place on Ubuntu 14.04 - so people on a different distro should be prepared to do some integration/porting work (e.g. matching packages etc).

The next steps ahead are getting osgEarth.mk to compile/link via mxe, and creating corresponding simgear.mk/flightgear.mk for mxe, at which point we will investigate porting poweroftwo's autobuilder to use mxe for building a patched version of sg/fg including osgEarth support.