Building FlightGear - Devuan
HowTo build FlightGear stable (2017.3) or bleeding edge development version, hereinafter simply called next, on Devuan GNU/Linux Stable (Jessie). Users of Testing or Unstable at least have to change package names (version numbering) accordingly.
Instructions probabaly apply on Debian GNU/Linux Jessie, too.
The meaning of this article is to be a short, checklist like, overview of the specific steps to compile FlightGear and components on Debian. For more detailed information please refer to the main article Building FlightGear on Linux.
For beginners with compiling it is highly recommended to follow this guide step by step. Any modification to most of the here used commands may cause trouble.
Requirements and Preparations
A bunch of packages (as well as some of their dependencies) are required to compile FlightGear:
- Tools
su -c "apt-get install automake cmake coreutils g++ gcc git make sed subversion"
- Dependencies
su -c "apt-get install \ freeglut3-dev libboost-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libdbus-1-dev \ libfltk1.3-dev libglew-dev libgtkglext1-dev libjpeg62-turbo-dev \ libopenal-dev libopenscenegraph-dev libqt5opengl5-dev \ librsvg2-dev libxml2-dev qt5-default qtdeclarative5-dev"
- If you prefer you might replace "libcurl4-openssl-dev" by "libcurl4-gnutls-dev".
- If "libjpeg62-turbo-dev" breaks package dependencies, just install one of the other versions' -dev.
- Add "libudev-dev" if you need FG's feature
-D EVENT_INPUT=ON
.
- During installation development packages of libraries which are going to be compiled must not be installed. They can safely be re-installed after compilation. Namely these are "libplib-dev" and "simgear-dev".
Build and install
Because we are going to install versions different to the ones in the Debian repositories, it is recommended to install FlightGear in a place independent of the base system, such as /usr/local/FG-Stable
or $HOME/FG-Stable
. This way also has the advantage of easily managing several FlightGear versions, even with different versions of OpenSceneGraph and/or plib, simply by altering the installation prefix. I suggest to make this directory writeable by the user so there is no need to become root for the make
commands. We'll use $FG_INSTALL_DIR
as a placeholder for this directory.
Another placeholder will be $FG_SRC_DIR
, it stands for the absolute path to the directory which is supposed to keep the folders of the various source codes. So, in the instructions below, you have to replace these with the local paths or even export
them (in every terminal you're using them) for the process:
export FG_INSTALL_DIR=$HOME/FG-Stable && mkdir $FG_INSTALL_DIR export FG_SRC_DIR=$HOME/src && mkdir $FG_SRC_DIR
Have in mind that the data is a relatively large download (GIT about 2.3 GiB (required disk space 4 GiB) / Stable about 1.5 GiB). So, to save some time, it is a good idea to fetch it while building the sources.
For some basic info on git commands for FlightGear users we have a git for laymen section.
For more/advanced cmake options and SimGear's and FlightGear's optional features see the cmake article.
Do not mix instructions for stable and next! Not even for fgdata, mixing versions will almost certainly break the installation.
plib
Stable and next:
While just installing package "libplib-dev" should work, it's recommended to build it from source.
cd $FG_SRC_DIR git clone https://git.code.sf.net/p/libplib/code libplib.git cd libplib.git echo "1.8.6" > version sed s/PLIB_TINY_VERSION\ \ 5/PLIB_TINY_VERSION\ \ 6/ -i src/util/ul.h git commit --all --message "Increase tiny version to 6." mkdir $FG_SRC_DIR/build-plib && cd $FG_SRC_DIR/build-plib cmake -D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH="$FG_INSTALL_DIR" $FG_SRC_DIR/libplib.git make -j$(nproc) && make install
SimGear
Stable and next:
cd $FG_SRC_DIR git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/flightgear/simgear simgear.git
Stable only:
cd simgear.git git checkout release/2017.3
Stable and next:
mkdir $FG_SRC_DIR/build-sg && cd $FG_SRC_DIR/build-sg cmake CFLAGS="--std=c++11" -D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH="$FG_INSTALL_DIR" \ $FG_SRC_DIR/simgear.git make -j$(nproc) && make install
FlightGear source
Stable and next:
cd $FG_SRC_DIR git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/flightgear/flightgear flightgear.git
Stable only:
cd flightgear.git git checkout release/2017.3
Stable and next:
mkdir $FG_SRC_DIR/build-fg && cd $FG_SRC_DIR/build-fg cmake CFLAGS="--std=c++11" -D FG_DATA_DIR:PATH="$FG_INSTALL_DIR/fgdata" \ -D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH="$FG_INSTALL_DIR" $FG_SRC_DIR/flightgear.git make -j$(nproc) && make install
FlightGear data
Stable only:
cd $FG_INSTALL_DIR wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/flightgear/files/release-2017.3/FlightGear-2017.3.1-data.tar.bz2/download -O FlightGear-2017.3.1-data.tar.bz2 tar xjf FlightGear-2017.3.1-data.tar.bz2
next only:
cd $FG_INSTALL_DIR git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/flightgear/fgdata fgdata
Trial run and finishing process
When all the builds are done and the data download has finished it is time for a test run:
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$FG_INSTALL_DIR/lib/:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH $FG_INSTALL_DIR/bin/fgfs --launcher
- The
fgfs
binary needs to find our self compiled libraries at runtime and therefore we have to tell the linker (ld) where to find them. That is what the first line here does. You might want to add this line to your$HOME/.bashrc
to have this as a persistent setting (may cause problems, if one has installed more than one version of FlightGear!). - Have in mind, the
$FG_INSTALL_DIR
and$FG_SRC_DIR
variables are available for this session only. For future use of these lines, replace them by the real paths.
To avoid the need to give the path to the fgfs
command each time, you might consider to create a symlink at a place that is listed in $PATH:
ln -s $FG_INSTALL_DIR/bin/fgfs $HOME/bin/fgfs