Building FlightGear - Linux

This section describes how to build FlightGear on Linux system.

Compiling FlightGear is not a task for novice users. Thus, if you're a beginner (we all were once) on a platform which binaries are available for, we recommend postponing this task and just starting with the binary distribution to get you flying.

October 29th 2006, Flightgear CVS MAIN Branch switched to OSG support. Plib support remains available in CVS using PRE_OSG_PLIB_20061029 Branch. (cvs up -rPRE_OSG_PLIB_20061029)

Requirements

Before you can compile FlightGear, you need to have the followings installed on your computer:

C++ compiler

These are: c++, cpp, gcc, g++ found under the /usr/bin directory. You will also need to have the tools autoconf and automake1.9 installed.

CVS

Yes, the program is called 'CVS'. This is used for downloading the latest set of source code.

OpenGL support

More specifically, your system needs the support for hardware accelerated graphics. You can check for this by running:

glxinfo | grep direct

Note: To run the above command, you need to have the tool mesa-utils installed.

You should then see:

direct rendering: Yes

This means you are good to go as far as OpenGL support is concerned.

If you see:

direct rendering: No

Don't panic yet. This may just mean some required libraries for hardware accelerated graphic are missing. Go ahead and try installing plib1.8.4 and its dependencies first. If you still get the above message, then you will need to do some googling and troubleshoot yourself.

Dependencies

FlightGear is dependent on quite a few number of libraries. You do not need to compile all of them yourself, but you will at least need to have their development version installed. For example, the development version for package plib1.8.4 is plib1.8.4-dev.

The dependency is summarized in the following tree. Please note that each library has its own dependencies, and most of these are not shown here.

• FlightGear
  • OpenAL and ALUT
  • SimGear
    • PLIB (until version 0.9.10 release sources, PRE_OSG_PLIB_20061029 CVS branch)
      • (Free)GLUT or SDL (We recommend the use of SDL)
    • OpenSceneGraph (cvs HEAD branch)
      • OpenThreads
      • Producer
      • libfreetype6-dev
      • libjpeg62-dev
      • libungif4-dev
      • libtiff4-dev
      • libpng12-dev
      • libxmu-dev
      • libxi-dev

If you attack the above dependencies in the order listed below, you should be good:

1. Glut. Most distributions include glut packages, although you may have to hunt for them. Make sure you install both the glut and glut-devel packages.

2. Zlib. Most distributions install the basic zlib libraries by default, but not the development portions. If you don't have zlib.h, you probably need to install the zlib-devel package for your distribution.

3. Plib - portability libraries and scene graph.

4. Metakit. A suitable version of MetaKit is included in the SimGear/src-libs/ subdirectory. If your distribution doesn't provide a Metakit (and Metakit-devel) package, you will have to build and install it before you can compile SimGear.

5. OpenSceneGraph

6. SimGear - Simulation support libraries. If you are building FlightGear from CVS, you need the CVS version of SimGear. If you have strange build errors, one of the first things to check is that you have an up-to-date version of SimGear built and installed.

Compiling

To compile and install FlightGear (and its dependencies) system wide, you need be root. Next, do:

cd /usr/local/src

Getting and compiling SimGear

Follow these steps: Step 1:

cvs -d :pserver:cvsguest@cvs.simgear.org:/var/cvs/SimGear-0.3 login
CVS passwd: guest

cvs -d :pserver:cvsguest@cvs.simgear.org:/var/cvs/SimGear-0.3 co source

Step 2:

mv source simgear
cd simgear
./autogen.sh
./configure

Step 3:

make; make install

Getting and compiling FlightGear

Step 1:

cvs -d :pserver:cvsguest@cvs.flightgear.org:/var/cvs/FlightGear-0.9 login
CVS passwd: guest

cvs -d :pserver:cvsguest@cvs.flightgear.org:/var/cvs/FlightGear-0.9 co source

Step 2:

mv source flightgear
cd flightgear
./autogen.sh
./configure

Step 3:

make; make install

External links

Instructions

• MSYS
• MinGW/cross-compiler
• CodeBlocks IDE
• OpenSUSE 10.1
• MSVC7 *.Net
• MSVC8 aka Visual 2005
• Mac OS X (0.9.10 and CVS)

Tools

Free/Open Source

• gcc - the GNU compiler (collection)
• make - GNU make
• autools - autoconf, automake, libtool & co
• distcc - distributed (fast!) compilations for any network
• gprof - the GNU profiler
• ccache - compiler cache, pre-compiled objects for gcc
• doxygen - source code documenting
• gdb - the GNU project debugger
• DDD - Data Display Debugger
• CVS - Concurrent Versioning System
  • http://cvsbook.red-bean.com/cvsbook.html
  • http://www.cs.utah.edu/dept/old/texinfo/cvs/cvs_toc.html
  • http://www.wincvs.org/
• SVN
  • http://www.subversion.org

Free/Proprietary

• Intel VTune (free Win32/Linux versions available for non-commercial use:requires an INTEL CPU!)
• AMD's Developer Tools (CodeAnalyst, available for free for Win32/Linux )