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://mapserver.flightgear.org/fgdata/

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!

Plase note: Gitorious apparently can't handle the initial git clone. Please, clone from mapserver and pull (update) from Gitorious:

git pull git://gitorious.org/fg/fgdata.git

IMPORTANT: Be sure you use msysGit 1.7.0.2 or newer version, as previous versions have problems with large repositories, and won't download more than 2Gb of data.

IMPORTANT II: Some files demand that CR/LF (carriage return / line feed) line breaks are kept in the way they are stored on Gitorious. Make sure to set "git-config core.safecrlf true" and "git-config core.autocrlf false" in your options or you may receive nasty error or even a crash on startup of FG (e.g. fgtzfile_read(): : Invalid argument... Fatal error: Timezone reading failed).

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.

If your antivirus warns you of a trojan, ignore. AVG and avast! are known for false positives.

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. Open Git Bash and go to your FlightGear/data/ directory by using the "cd" command. Run "git pull" and let it update.