I. GENERAL LINUX INSTRUCTIONS ============================== This is a short description of the things that need to be done to get FlightGear up and running under Linux. 1. Prerequisites: - You need to understand the concepts of 3D acceleration under Linux and the needed libraries. You will need to install and configure accelerated drivers for your specific video card. It is beyond the scope of this document to describe the process for your specific video card. More and more distributions are coming out with pre-packaged drivers so look around (just in case) before you go out and build software yourself. Here are some potentially useful sites, but be careful and find the specific instructions for your specific video card and distribution: http://www.thedukeofurl.org/reviews/misc/3dlinux/ http://www.linux3d.net/ http://dri.sourceforge.net/ http://www.nvidia.com http://glide.xxedgexx.com/ Without accelerated 3d rendering, FlightGear could never run at decent frame rates, even on the fastest CPU's. - You will need the GLUT library version 3.7 (or greater, aka GameGLUT) installed. Grab it at: http://reality.sgi.com/opengl/glut3/glut3.html Note: glut-3.7 is included with Mesa 3.x so if you've already grabbed the latest version of mesa, you should have everything you need. Alternatively, you can use the 3D-stuff that came along with your Linux distribution. At least RedHat (5.3 and later) and S.u.S.E. 6.0 (or later) may contain all the things you need depending again on your video card. - Steve Baker's plib library. Get it from: http://plib.sf.net ... and follow the instructions there to install it. - SimGear. Get it from: http://www.simgear.org ... and follow the instructions there to install it. 2. Build FlightGear: You will need the following files: FlightGear-x.xx.tar.gz (source code) which can be found under: ftp://flightgear.sourceforge.net/pub/flightgear/Source and the base package located at: ftp://flightgear.sourceforge.net/pub/flightgear/Shared/ the file is called fgfs-base-x.xx.tar.gz (data files) Ok, now that you got all the stuff, let's proceed towards installation. Unpack FlightGear-x.xx.tar.gz using : tar xvfz FlightGear-x.xx.tar.gz and cd info FlightGear-x.xx. Run: ./configure and wait a few minutes. configure knows about a lot of options. Have a look at the file INSTALL in the FlightGear source directory to learn about them. If run without options, configure assumes that you will install the data files under /usr/local/share/FlightGear. Assuming configure finished successfully, simply run make and wait for the make process to finish. Now become root (for example by using the su command) and type make install This will install the binaries in /usr/local/bin. Notice that the name of the FlightGear binary is "fgfs". 3. Install the data files Change to /usr/local/lib tar xvfz WHERE_YOU_DOWNLOADED_THE_FILES/fgfs-base-x.xx.tar.gz That's it... 4. Fly! If everything went ok, simply type runfgfs at the prompt. You should see the FlightGear splash-screen and a few seconds later you'll find youself somewhere in the desert, ready for take-off. 5. Strange things happen... We have mailing lists set up for specific FlightGear problems, bugs, and questions. Please see the flightgear web page for details. 6. Conclusion I hope this document provides some help. If it does, send virtual/real beer to me, if not flame me! Bernhard H. Buckel Updated by Curtis Olson 6/26/2001 II. RedHat Linux Notes ======================= Summary: There are known problems with the versions of libstdc++ that ships with both RedHat-5.1 and RedHat-5.2. You need to upgrade your libstdc++ before attempting to build flight gear on a RedHat system. Raymond de Vries writes: I ran into [this] problem on my RedHat 5.2 system (brand new). After some searching I found out that it's got to do with a 'bug' in the stdlibc++ libraries. I picked up libstdc++-2.9.0-2.i386.rpm, installed it and FGFS compiled just fine. However, some other packages must have the libstdc++-2.8 libraries.... BTW I also solved it with the 2.8 libraries by including /usr/include/g++/std/bastring.cc into the example programs. I believe this can be done since it's a template, correct me if I'm wrong. III. Linux/AXP Notes ==================== As of 2/19/99 I'm not aware of any glide port to Linux/AXP so it's software rendering only for now. :-( This following information is contributed by "Daniel J. Frasnelli" 1) Mesa was not built correctly by default. I had to add the "-mieee" flag to the Make-config for Mesa-3.1beta1 to fix the problem. After building and installation, all of the problems I had previously with GL programs under AlphaLinux disappeared. 2) I also had to set the '-mieee' flag in $CFLAGS before configuring and building FGFS. The -mieee switch fixes floating point exception handling. I heavily optimized both Mesa and FGFS, using the libffm "fast math library for Alpha" in preference over the default libm, sticking all sorts of strange flags in $CFLAGS, etc. These flags should be adjusted for your specific architecture: export CFLAGS="-mieee -mcpu=ev56 -Wa,-m21164a -pipe -g" export CXXFLAGS="-mieee -mcpu=ev56 -Wa,-m21164a -pipe -g" ./configure