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.

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

Dependencies

FlightGear is dependent on quite a few number of libraries. You do not need to compile all of them yourself, but you do need to have their headers installed at least. For example, the headers 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 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)

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 )