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 following 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. Windows developers may wish to see Using TortoiseCVS with FlightGear.
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 (svn trunk)
- OpenThreads
- Producer
- libfreetype6-dev
- libjpeg62-dev
- libungif4-dev
- libtiff4-dev
- libpng12-dev
- libxmu-dev
- libxi-dev
- PLIB (until version 0.9.10 release sources, PRE_OSG_PLIB_20061029 CVS branch)
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, otherwise FlightGear may be able to compile but won't run correctly.
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.
5. 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
Assuming you are root, do:
cd /usr/local/src
Getting and compiling SimGear
Step 1:
Login to the cvs server and checkout the latest version of SimGear's source code with:
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:
Since all the source code will be downloaded into a directory called source, you will need to rename the directory into something more meaningful.
Rename the above directory by doing:
mv source simgear
Next, go into the directory and make preparations for the compilation:
cd simgear ./autogen.sh ./configure
Step 3:
Compile and install SimGear by doing:
make; make install
Getting and compiling FlightGear
Step 1:
To login to the cvs version and checkout the latest version of Flightgear's source code, use:
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
A directory with the name source will then be created with all of Flightgearear's source code downloaded into it.
Step 2:
To rename the above directory, use the following command:
mv source flightgear
Next, go into the folder and make preparations for the compilation:
cd flightgear ./autogen.sh ./configure
Step 3:
Now you can compile and install Flightgear by:
make; make install
Step 4:
Get the data directory:
cvs -d :pserver:cvsguest@cvs.flightgear.org:/var/cvs/FlightGear-0.9 co data
And install it in (or as) /usr/local/share/FlightGear
mv data /usr/local/share/FlightGear
External links
Instructions
- MSYS
- MinGW/cross-compiler
- CodeBlocks IDE
- OpenSUSE 10.1 10.2
- 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
- BuGLe - OpenGL debugger
- 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
- SVN
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 )