Howto:OpenSuse 10.3

This is a quick HOWTO that describes installation of a FlightGear source distribution on a OpenSuse (SuSE) linux system.

This article covers OpenSuse 10.3. See OpenSUSE 10.1 10.2 for older versions. You might want to read Building Flightgear for a general description of the build process.

Prerequisites

Hardware

The system used to create this HOWTO was a i386 single cpu with a 6GB disk. Please check Hardware Recommendations for the recommended hardware. Make sure, you have 3D acceleration enabled for you graphics card.

Operating system

OpenSuse 10.3 base installation. After booting from openSUSE-1.3-GM-i386-mini.iso performed a network installation. Leave all installation settings as default and selected KDE desktop. Register you installation to get an online update source. Perform the online update to get the latest updates.

Additional software

You need to install several additional packages. Open YaST, select software installation. Choose "search", search for the following packages and tag them:

• gcc
• gcc-c++
• freealut-devel
• plib-devel
• zlib-devel
• automake
• mesa-devel
• freeglut-devel
• xorg-x11-libX11-devel

Click apply. There are a bunch of extra packages selected automatically. Hit OK and run through the installation process. Do another online update, just to make sure.

Building FlightGear

Now you shoulde have all dependencies solved for a fresh build of FlightGear. To build your version, create a folder FlightGear-1.0 where you have write permissions (e.g. your homedirectory) and download

• SimGear-1.0.0.tar.gz
• FlightGear-1.0.0.tar.gz
• fgfs-base-1.0.0.tar.bz2

In your FlightGear-1.0 folder, whereto you downloaded these files, unpack them with

tar xvzf SimGear-1.0.0.tar.gz
tar xvzf FlightGear-1.0.0.tar.gz
tar xvjf fgfs-base-1.0.0.tar.bz2

this will unpack all files and creates three directories:

• FlightGear-1.0.0
• SimGear-1.0.0
• data

cd into SimGear-1.0.0 and type

./configure --prefix=/full/path/to/FlightGear-1.0
make
make install

now cd into ../FlightGear-1.0.0 and type

./configure --prefix=/full/path/to/FlightGear-1.0
make
make install

And thats it! Now you have all FlightGear executables under FlightGear-1.0/bin and the data tree containing the aircraft, scenery and much more under FlightGear-1.0/data. Type

FlightGear-1.0/bin/fgfs --fg-scenery=/full/path/to/FlightGear-1.0/data/Scenery --fg-root=/full/path/to/FlightGear-1.0

and fly away!