FlightGear Git on Windows

This document guides you through the installation process of the development version of FlightGear (Git) on Windows.

A first Git install

Pre-installation work

Before we start, we will choose an installation directory. This can be any drive on your computer. In this document, we assume that you install FlightGear on the D:/ drive. Just replace the commands given in this document by your installation directory when using another drive or different directory root.

Create the following directories on your drive:

• FlightGear/
  • bin/
    • win32/
  • data/

Obtaining data from Git

You can use any Git software, however we advise to use msysGit (which will be used in this document). You can download it through this link. Follow the download/installation instructions that show up on your screen.

The Git Bash window

Once msysGit is installed, browse to your FlightGear/data directory and right click. Choosing the "Git Bash" option pops up a command prompt. Add the following command and press Enter.

git clone git://gitorious.org/fg/fgdata.git D:/FlightGear/data

Now msysGit will pull the entire fgdata package into your FlightGear/data directory. This can take up to a couple of hours on slow internet connections!

Getting the binary

Now we've got all the data, we need to have a binary, which contains the actual software that runs FlightGear. Go to ftp://ftp.ihg.uni-duisburg.de/FlightGear/Win32 and download the latest fgrun+fgfs-osg-win32-git.zip file that is available. Unpack the file in your FlightGear/bin/win32 directory.

Running FlightGear

Run FlightGear/bin/win32/fgrun.exe to launch the FlightGear Wizard, or run FlightGear/bin/win32/fgfs.exe by commandline.

Keeping your FlightGear up to date

Of course you want to keep FlightGear up to date, to keep current with the latest developments. Else you don't have a reason to use the development version.

1. Download the latest binary, as described in Getting the binary and overwrite the old one in FlightGear/bin/win32 (instead you could rename the current binary's directory to something like win32_latest, in case the newer binary doesn't work well).
2. Update your FlightGear/data/ directory, to match it with the binary. For smooth operations, it is very important to have data and a binary from matching dates!
   1. Find out what date your just downloaded binary was created.
   2. Find out what's the version of the latest commit of the day before that day, through the Gitorious log. A version-"number" looks like: da1ba93.
   3. Right click > Git Bash the following script to your FlightGear/data directory (replacing da1ba93 with your appropriate version).
      

      git checkout da1ba93 D:/FlightGear/data